Google faces copyright fight over YouTube · Time Warner upset over the use of its material · 100m videos under scrutiny for breaches Jane Martinson Friday October 13, 2006 The Guardian Dick Parsons, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, fired a shot across the bows of Google, saying his group would pursue its copyright complaints against the video sharing site YouTube.com. Google paid $1.6bn for YouTube this week amid concerns that some of the fledgling website's 100m videos breached copyright rules. Time Warner, the media and entertainment group that owns the Warner Brothers movie studio, Time Inc magazines and the HBO TV channel, is one of several large media companies concerned about possibly illegal use of its material on YouTube. Mr Parsons told the Guardian: "You can assume we're in negotiations with YouTube and that those negotiations will be kicked up to the Google level in the hope that we can get to some acceptable position." He denied the decision to pursue any potential infringement had been prompted by this week's acquisition. Google, whose core search function attracted 204 million users in August, four times those who used YouTube, has a higher market capitalisation than Time Warner. "We were going to pursue it anyway," he said. "If you let one thing ignore your rights as an owner it makes it much more difficult to defend those rights when the next guy comes along." He took a more emollient stance than some when he said: "We'd like to have our content displayed on these platforms, but on a basis that it respects our rights as the owner of that content." full article here : http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1921154,00.html
they're sure to strike a deal by sharing part of the profits with em or something similar. Big G aint that dumb to buy youtube without considering the probable copyright infringement issues and must definitely have some strategy in mind.
it seemed that youtube had to make friends with them before the deal went down. once youtube proved that this was possible google struck