Fiat Lux

Whether any of this is true or not, Mark Cuban doesn't know (nor do I) but it does pass the smell test and is an interesting 'behind the scenes' take on the Google-YouTube acquisition:

In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube's traffic they quickly choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous copyright infringement claims that were mounting.

[snip]

So the parties (including venture capital firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims. Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.

Thios passes my sanity check because it would be utterly irresponsible to not make some kind of provision for future copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Actually, 500 million might even be a low number, depending on how many lawsuits get filed.

The letter Cuban cites, however, goes on to explain how the whole game will be rigged so that the actual artists whose content has beeen reposted will not see any of the revenue the media companies collect from YouTube. That seems a bit more farfeteched to me, but I don't know the entertainment biz at all, perhaps that is SOP for them.

Who knows, the whole thing could just be sour grapes on Cuban's part, but it's still interesting reading.