Slashdot Mirror
Only a 'Moron' Would Buy YouTube
ColinPL writes to mention a News.com article about some harsh words from Mark Cuban, on the possible purchase of video-sharing site YouTube. According to Mr. Cuban only a 'moron' would buy the site, because of the obvious possibility of lawsuits over intellectual property. From the article: "Cuban, co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, also said YouTube would eventually be 'sued into oblivion' because of copyright violations. 'They are just breaking the law,' Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. 'The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue ... There is a reason they haven't yet gone public, they haven't sold. It's because they are going to be toasted,'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban
FYI: Cuban sold broadcast.com to yahoo for $5 billion in 1999. Sour grapes is when you don't actually acomplish what you set out to do.
"Somebody puts up something really good and you get, what, 60,000 viewers?" Cuban added during the event at Advertising Week in New York.
Well, according to this the all time high is 33 million views, with dozens of others in the one to ten million range. I know these aren't all unique viewers, and I'm not an advertising expert, but that sounds like a lot of people to me.
Cuban cautioned advertisers against investing heavily in so-called viral campaigns that are spread by users beyond their initial point of distribution on YouTube or other video-sharing sites. But he touted opportunities to run commercials on high-definition television such as his HDNet network.
So he's basically bad-mouthing Youtube in order to promote his own network. To paraphrase Cuban himself, only a moron would believe everything this guy says.
Maybe that won't stop some jokers though.
Actually, I tend to feel that the copyright holders have an advantage that the 'jokers' are (currently) localized to a few sites. At least yourtube has a policy to remove disputed content... clone #10001 may not.
Home users are getting access to faster and faster internet lines and streaming AV is becoming as common as browsing HTML pages, it can't be too long before there are many many more 'yourtubes', some may be more reluctant to remove content based on a simple letter. If some user in one of the many countries that the US doesn't see eye to eye with, hosts some episode of 'friends' on his/her site, think a strongly worded letter would do the trick?
Something has to give.
The person that comes up with a model to get paid for generating content without requiring total control of the distribution mechanism isn't going to want for much, I can tell you!
google aggressively removes copyrighted material as well
More data, damnit!
Dear sir,
News Corporation owns MySpace.
CNET Networks owns News.com.
Have fun with your lawsuit.
Sincerely,
Me
For more information, click here.
Didn't Mark Cuban get rich by stealing other peoples content and putting it online. How far he has come from his humble beginings.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com