October 10th, 2006
Mark Cuban says Google is crazy with YouTube
Mark Cuban has spoken out on Google's acquisition of YouTube and thinks Google is crazy and has landed itself in a field of litigation landmines. Cuban was quoted last month saying that only a "moron" would purchase YouTube and he may have a point. Cuban certainly knows a bad deal (good deal depending on whose perspective) when he sees one since he himself pulled off a 5.7 billion dollar sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo in the height of the dotcom boom and laughed his way to the bank. Considering the fact that broadcast.com had nowhere near the user base and earning power of YouTube, one could see the 1.65 billion dollar sale of YouTube as a bargain. YouTube has so far avoided any serious litigation, but that was before there was anyone with deep pockets to sue and Google certainly has deep pockets.
Mark Cuban is almost certain that Google will be in trouble and writes.
"Could Fox, the owner of Myspace put GooTube in a huge hole by being legally aggressive and going after every video of Stewy from Family Guy , American Idol, any of their TV shows"
However, Mark Cuban being the smart business man that he is hedged his bet and tells us his contingency plan if Google gets off relatively easy with the lawsuits.
"Well, I'm ready for that too. I went ahead and registered www.effingreat.com because thats how much fun its going to be using Filesanywhere.com features to support a "load everything you own and share it with world" website.
I will host in the same way as Youtube and Google. Upload in the same, dont ask, dont tell approach. I will sell ads however they do. Preroll, or adsense or whatever.
Only i will expand the storage beyond 100mbs and will open it up to books, term papers, pictures, movies, music, articles, anything and everything that can be digitized. I will add the appropriate disclaimers and provide a cool social networking interface. Maybe something like Goowy.Com or maybe something like Flixster.com. I mean, why not ? What could be cooler User Generated Content than the termpaper you wrote on Daniel Boone ? Or what could be more interesting than scanning in a book you wanted to give to someone and just posting it ? And dang, just wholesale upload all of your MP3s."
Note that the typos are not mine since it's quoted verbatim. No one can say for sure how this is going to turn out, but business is going to get very good for the lawyers.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
