Kudos to Youtube for getting them to say yes. My advice to you is to always protect your downside. Ignore all the scammers who want your money, and dont listen to all the tax scammers who want to save you money on taxes. Writing that check is painful, but its the right thing to do. That aside..
It will be interesting to see what happens next and what happens in the copyright world. I still think Google Lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I dont think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than doans has pills to go with the pile on copyright suits that follow. Think maybe how Google discloses what they perceive the copyright risk to be in the SEC filings might be an interesting read ?
I think there will be supoenas to get the names of Youtube and Google Video users. Lots of them as those copyright owners not part of the gravy train go after both Google and their users for infringement.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts DRM. As it stands now, there is no DRM on all that video being offered from Google or YouTube. Millions of copyrighted videos that their owners spent a boatload to copyprotect that is available to everyone and everyone without it. (Personally i think DRM is a waste of money, but will all those labels and content providers ?)
I think it was interesting how Google and YT both rushed to get deals done with the music labels. That tells me that they arent comfortable hiding behind the safe harbor laws. If they were, they would just be telling people to send take down notices rather than doing deals that require software to detect copyrights.
It will be interesting to see if Youtube moves their videos over to Googles Data Centers. Google is a centralized datacenter with peering from what I can tell. COmpletely different than what the CDN networks do. Will that set a new trend ? It makes bandwidth much cheaper as others have pointed out.
It will be interesting to see just how google reconciles selling videos like Crazy in Love from Sony, when the same video is available as a user upload for free from youtube.
it will be interesting to see how Fox reacts to this deal Fox owns content. Neither google or YT does. Could Fox, the owner of Myspace put GooTube in a huge hole by being legally aggressive and going after every video of Stewy from Family Guy , American Idol, any of their TV shows ? The same with their movies. Beyond just Gootube, (and I mash them together with nothing but love :), Fox could make them look real bad by using supoaenas to go after individual Gootube users. Fox is also a stickler for DRM, they aint gonna like having their content floating DRM free around the net. Sure, myspace would have to clean up some of their own videos, but it would be a far easier chore than Gootube has. Now that would be a celebrity lawyer match worth watching.
Which in turns means that the Copyright Detection Systems in place by Google better be a whole lot better than they are right now. They are going to have to detect music, TV Network Bugs, all kinds of protected materials. Right now they are doing nothing. Which leads to movies, like ours
We sent our Take down notice today by fax. But should I supoaena the name of the person who uploaded it ? I wont. Someone else will for their content.
And what if Im completely, absolutely wrong and no one sues anyone ? That everyone just loves the fact that their content is available to tens of millions of viewers and advertisers and Youtube and Google definitely qualify to be protected behind the Safe Harbors of the DMCA ?
That Im an idiot and it really is different this time, and the content companies have all recognized that ?
Well, I’m ready for that too. I went ahead and registered http://www.effingreat.com because thats how much fun its going to be using Filesanywhere.com features to support a “load everything you own and share it with world” website.
I will host in the same way as Youtube and Google. Upload in the same, dont ask, dont tell approach. I will sell ads however they do. Preroll, or adsense or whatever.
Only i will expand the storage beyond 100mbs and will open it up to books, term papers, pictures, movies, music, articles, anything and everything that can be digitized. I will add the appropriate disclaimers and provide a cool social networking interface. Maybe something like Goowy.Com or maybe something like Flixster.com. I mean, why not ? What could be cooler User Generated Content than the termpaper you wrote on Daniel Boone ? Or what could be more interesting than scanning in a book you wanted to give to someone and just posting it ? And dang, just wholesale upload all of your MP3s.
And best of all, I would get a license for public performance from ASCAP/BMI so the people that have to fight the hardest to get paid, actually do !
And of course I would have some other tricks up my sleeve. Maybe pull a page from the old shareware days. Add a paypal link to every content page and let people get paid for their original content. If no one is going to sue anyone for copyright infringement anymore, maybe you could upload stuff you dont have the rights to and get paid by generous people who want to transfer some dollars via PayPal to you.
Am I suprised, by the Google YT deal. Yes. Does it open up a whole new world if they go liability free ?
You have no idea.