"Sued into Oblivion" -- Not if Google can Help It

So what a shock to get home tonight and find an alert waiting for me saying Google has bought YouTube. I find it slightly odd there is no mention of it on the Google Blog, though maybe that's because the deal isn't official yet, persay. It's even on Digg.com as the most popular story today.

The fact that Google has bought YouTube isn't surprising; the fact that Google paid $1.65 billion is mind boggling. I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately on business and globalization, which oftens means the tossing around of insane numbers like $60 billion in revenues in one year. It is difficult to wrap your head around such a vast sum, but then again if you look at the successful billion dollar companies, they are that way for a reason.

What strikes me as interesting about the YouTube acquisition is that open-ended issue of copyrighted material on the Internet. YouTube has made some strides but stricking deals with the likes of CBS, BMG and Universal Music, but still, in the realm of the Internet, copyright material is still up for debate. Not whether the material is copyrighted (most of the time it is), but whether or not the Internet counts as "fair-use." It is diffcult to see this union as something other than another area for ppc ads for Google that also gives a tremendous amount of funds to fight inevitable copyright infringement lawsuits.

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li sums it up best at the end of the Tribune article:

"It's going to be like, 'You can either fight us or you can make money with us.'"

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Internet at large and the world of online video in particular now.