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Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal

Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal

Not sure how accurate this is, but this is at the very least a fascinating guess as to Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal. One interesting part about this is the theory that Google negotiated with large media companies, who had potentially large and crippling copyright claims against YouTube, "an agreement to look the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement continues to flourish. ... [Google] knows that every day they can operate in the shadows of copyright law is another day that Youtube can grow. ... As Google looked at it they bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement."

In other words, without a temporary cessation of copyright law, this new industry may wither on the vine. Google may have been able to use hundreds of millions of dollars to overcome this here, but makes you wonder what other industries might flourish without the specter of copyright law hanging over everything.

This point is reinforced by this article, which points out that but for the "safe harbor" provision introduced by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in 1998 (which was opposed by Hollywood), "there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0." That these developments narrowly escaped being squashed by copyright law does not count in copyright law's favor; again, it makes you wonder what other intellectual, artistic, technological, and entrepreneurial developments and endeavors are being stultified or prevented by the corpus of copyright law.

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