Mark Cuban's blog on Google's acquisition of YouTube

Last night I published a link to Mark Cuban's blog and some turkey put a long spam message as the first comment. This new Blogger Beta doesn't have a feature yet to delete comments, so I deleted the whole post. Spam really pisses me off. Overnight I got seven hits to that post, so here is the link again.

In the deleted post I went to a lot of trouble to reformat the content to be easier to read, but I'm not doing that again. Read it for yourself at the link.

Youtube knew they had an issue and had offered a straight revenue share deal if the complainants would call off the dogs and give them time. The media companies quickly rejected this path for two reasons. First off Youtube wasn't making any money and was fuzzy about how they would generate revenue in the future. But more important the media companies view is that there was a mountain of past infringement that Youtube had engaged in and built their business on and they felt they deserved some of this accumulated value. And who could blame them. In spite of the media "user generated" puff pieces it was clear to all involved that they generated that content by hooking up their TV tuner cards to their PCs.

These comments by an unnamed but clearly in-the-know observer bring up serious and as yet undecided legal points regarding copyright and revenue flow (i.e. royalties).

Question is: As it now operates, is YouTube a ticking bomb? For that matter, is Google itself skating on the same thin ice?

Google is eating everything in sight. I heard a great description of Google's competition strategy..."deny oxygen." In other words, Google simply hires or buys any raw materials that might otherwise be used against them by competitors, whether content, design, emerging businesses or human resources.

For those of us on the gravy train, it's kinda like having a very rich uncle. Hey, except for not being able to delete spam comments, I'm a happy camper. And I'm sure that little wrinkle will be ironed out in due time.