Only a 'Moron' Would Buy YouTube 178
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,'"
Mr. Cuban (Score:1, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does he mean that nobody has had enough money to sue Youtube?? WTF?? Once the RIAA get their head out of Mrs Jones' dial-up records, they might like to have a crack.
Its another story if he thinks there isnt much money to go after...
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Not quite sure why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone else that sets up something similar would just get shutdown. It's very strange.
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Re:Mr. Cuban (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mr. Cuban (Score:4, Interesting)
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You mean they only allow public domain work on their site?
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Re:Mr. Cuban (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, he started Audionet, which became broadcast.com. I will never, never, never live down the fact that I interviewed with him personally, along with one of his engineers, in the spring of 1996 for a tech job here in Dallas, and I expressed disappointment that the pay was going to be meager, though there was a lot of stock being offered. My only defense is that the bubble hadn't even come to Texas yet, and nobody thought stock was worth the risk of working for a little startup. When the interview ended, he politely said he hoped I would consider them anyway. By the time I got home, I realized I'd made a blunder, and tried to call back to salvage things. I was shut out; I couldn't even get the secretary on the phone any more, or a reswponse to email. I was probably doomed when I walked in, though, because I wore a suit.
Secret fact/verification: the original Audionet building was a warehouse in the Deep Ellum area with a roof so bad I think it was rotting. There were dishes on the roof. They had a swing hanging from the rafters in one corner.
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You avoided being a con-artist - good for you (Score:2, Insightful)
Broadcast.com was just that, a scam. I remember the Cuban road-show where he and Mary Meeker (who was an equity advisor at Morgan Stanley) both tried to pitch the sale of Broadcast.com. Not only was the presentation full of exaggerations and outright lies, Marky Meeker was grossly breaking the law and directly working for Morgan's IBanking side as an equity analyst (Equity analysts
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Re:You avoided being a con-artist - good for you (Score:4, Funny)
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Defense (Score:2)
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Oh, I've got one up oin you there. A startup company I'd been with for two years was bought by broadcast.com. I got some stock, and a few more options, but I quit because I thought I'd been screwed in the deal.
The broadcast.com IPO was two weeks later. And then it was
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My only defense is that the bubble hadn't even come to Texas yet, and nobody thought stock was worth the risk of working for a little startup.
Employees routinely get screwed even if they have good stock options. It's very common for the company - just before sale/IPO - to unilaterally change the terms of the deal so that employees are locked in for much longer than they agreed to be.
FWIW I once had options for 1% of a company which was later valued at (sticks pinky in mouth) 1 billllion dollars. I l
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Uninformed (Score:4, Funny)
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News Corporation [newscorp.com] owns MySpace.
CNET Networks [cnetnetworks.com] owns News.com.
Have fun with your lawsuit.
Sincerely,
Me
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Safe Harbor? (Score:2)
Maybe that won't stop some jokers though.
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I'm guessing that is a somewhat workable strategy unless some major player wants to buy it... then the content providers that are in competition with the buyer will swoop in and not only want a take-down but some real money just to make them bleed. And suddenly it's
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(A) As used in subsection (a), the term "service provider" means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.
I'll let you decide. There's a little bit of case law on the topic out there as well.
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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 l
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That's what I'd do.
Not to mention... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It worked for TheGlobe.com [salon.com], didn't it?
Re:Not to mention... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
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There's one born every minute (Score:4, Funny)
Funny... (Score:2, Funny)
1. Come up with an idea.
2. Find stupid VC's
3. ????
4. Profit!
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1. Come up with an idea.
2. Find stupid VC's
3. ????
4. Profit!
I don't even think the ??? are nessacary. The Vc pays you, you scram to jamaica and yoru done. The VC scams some retirement funds and the only losers are the end investor.
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It just pisses me off to no end (on a personal level) that I busted my ass to make a real, profitable, debt-free, brick-and-mortar business, and no investors are interested. If I had some flaky, money-losing idea, then they'd be knocking down my doors.
Fuckers.
You're nice guys, and don't want VCs (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't need this. At your stage, you're in what's called your cash cow era, or, sometimes known as the oil-well-in-the-basement phase. This means that you're actually making nice money steadily, but are probably in comparative growth stagnation. You'll need either higher profits (e.g. more to spend or dividend-out), start new products or add product lines, buy somebody to augment the aforementioned, or find a nice graceful exit strategy because YOUR COMPANY IS FINANCIALLY BORING. Sorry to shout, but VCs aren't interested in your measly growth. They want big return, and they want to syndicate the risk out as far as is possible.
Yes, you've done the right thing. Yes, you can continue to pump oil in your basement by doing the right things. If you're interested in taking considerable risk for considerable growth, the VCs will hunt you down like a dog.
Whining, however, will get you nowhere.
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of what kills an american every 2 hrs that you mentioned, then show
your products way of stoppping it.
Might also, try promoting it via OSHA or other similar avenues.
business (Score:2, Insightful)
Look at this dudes idea about selling out. [reuters.com] Sometimes it is better to just do what you are doing at the level you are doing it at and be happy! Companies that get that "must keep growing faster and faster or we fail it!" are not the ultimate. They are just one type of business mindset, no law says you have to emulate them.
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Get another pair of hands on the wheel, and the vehicle may be headed off a cliff.
Ancillary Value (Score:2)
It just has to be a lesser expense than any other advertising outlet.
One of the reasons networks spend big money on sports leagues is to get people to see their ads for their other programming during the games.
Damn.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Reminds me of the 0-day sites... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of the 0-day sites... (Score:4, Funny)
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Sour Grapes Mr. Cuban? (Score:1)
Take down all the copyrighted stuff, hire a bunch of lawyers, relax. Sounds easy enough to me. Perhaps I am a moron.
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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.
risk taking (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone suing U-Tube would be taking the risk of losing the lawsuit and setting a precident.
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The precedent is already set, man. Its called Napster, LimeWire, BearShare, MP3.com - want me to go on? The courts have already laid down the law - you cannot build your company off content you do not own. Anyone with wishful thinking that YouTube is going to stick around because they have a system for letting copyright infringments be taken down after much work by the copyright owner is utterly and totally deluding themselves. There are sooooo many copyright violations it'll either be death by bl
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Anyone suing U-Tube would be taking the risk of losing the lawsuit and setting a precident.
Elsewhere [slashdot.org] on /. I pontificated that YouTube was going to get taken down. While YouTube may still get slammed, I'm starting to rethink my position, especially with regard to how things turned out for Napster.
That is, the RIAA took a fairly big risk going after Napster because the music industry truly believed Napster to threaten their bottom line. Without getting into nitty gritties, many people today believe th
Advertise movies. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes and no. (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other, you've got examples like paypal.com - they've basically been enronning their ways around banking laws for years and no one has sued them to oblivion for not having a license, stealing money, etc.
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Ah, but that's just messing with the banks and the government. With YouTube it's much more serious, they're messing with the MPAA & RIAA.
Re:Yes and no. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a surprise for what reason? (Score:2)
I could see an online video cartel (Score:2, Insightful)
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I can see why this is in the interests of the users. I can see why this is in the interest of YouTube. But this is in the interests of the copyright owners because...?
Not gonna happen with YouTube ceasing to be the YouTube we know. If they weren't interested in defending their copyrights we already wouldn't have a problem.
Ummmmm... (Score:1)
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How about Russia [allofmp3.com]?
What if it was the copyright ppl themselves? (Score:1)
Low quality public access broadcasting with the already prepared royalty payment scheme (radios pay per play).
Let people upload whatever they want, if its putting views and people notice its a violation it just gets handled (for 99% of the cases)
Why don't they just fix it? (Score:2)
Closed minded nonsense (Score:1)
He's just jealous... (Score:3, Insightful)
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P.S. Don't forget who Cuban's audience was: advertisers.
Mod Cuban -1 Troll (Score:5, Informative)
Well, according to this [youtube.com] 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.
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It's a lot of people not being advertised to. This is the most obvious problem with youtube - no good advertising model has arisen. The longer youtube remains ad free, the more angry people will be when ads do come around (when I talk about ads I mean video ads, I have adblock so I don't see traditional ads).
DMCA to the rescue (Score:2)
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No. They can't do either in an automated way. They depend on such abuses (if you call pr0n that) to be reported to them, then they take action.
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YouTube cannot automatically verify the non-pr0n or copyright status of a video. When you report either to them, they take action. So long as they continue to act on infringement reports, the DMCA will continue to insulate them from claims of contributory infringement. If Hollywood doesn't like that, then they need to buy a better DMCA (which I don't put past them, by any means).
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Ummm, things are bit different on this planet.
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Thanks.
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OB Simpsons quote (Score:3, Insightful)
$1.5b too low. One Word: (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercials.
As soon as YouTube places commercials in front of their vids, even if they cookie them to just 1 per hour per viewer, the money will be flooding in.
Here's why: YouTube's content review and tagging system for searches, plus their popularity and "stars" rating systems are perfect metadata for targeted ads. Not "somewhat fuzzily targeted" based on collected trends but directly. That car. That skateboard. THAT song. Learn THAT trick. Go to THAT place. All for sale "HERE".
People won't stand for too many, but tuned right the loss of viewers from annoyance versus the revenue from commercials' simple brainwashing techniques (think of commercials as competing social memes) will balance.
Commercials. (Score:2)
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Um, No. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm not saying it should be otherwise, just that I don't think this defense is going to get YouTube very far. When the media conglomerates aren't happy, the laws get changed, or the judges
Cuban DEFINITELY knows what he's talking about (Score:2)
That's not to say that Cuban is a moron, quite the contrary.
In other news... (Score:2)
What a coincidence (Score:2)
Above the law? (Score:2)
The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue
Does it mean that the less money you got in that kind of business the higher above the law you are?
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only a moron would buy broadcast.com (Score:2, Informative)
Heh, Google has the answer. (Score:2)
No no no (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx-NLPH8JeM [youtube.com]
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