NEW YORK (AdAGE.com) — Last Friday, Jeff Reifman received a letter from YouTube, noting the video-sharing site had disabled some material he’d posted—a couple of video clips of “The Daily Show.” Mr. Reifman, a former MSN exec who lives in Seattle, wrote about it on News Cloud, an open news website he founded. And that set off the firestorm.
YouTube.com has been getting hit pretty hard lately with copyright infringement problems. Google overall has been getting his pretty hard with lawsuits. YouTube was a sitting duck and just waiting to be pounced on by companies for infringement. I think the only reason they’ve been waiting is that they didn’t really have the finance to back up all the legal lawsuits so there wasn’t much of a point in suing them.
“This instantly puts a clear frame on what exactly did Google buy and was it worth $1.6 billion?” Mr. Reifman said, later adding, “Someone at Viacom has a sense of humor, saying you guys are crazy to pay $1.6 billion and we’ll show you how crazy.”
On this one, I agree with Viacom. Google was pretty crazy to pay that much for a pretty simple — yet popular — service. Google could have done some crazy marketing and changes to their own site to make the same service. YouTube already had it done, but honestly, was it really worth $1.6 billion? I doubt it.
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