The copyright issue: The top question after Google buys YouTube is, "Will media companies sue over pirated content?" If they do, Google is ready, thanks to its experience defending Google Book Search against publishers, keeping Google Video out of its own copyright suits, and years of fighting for the right to host image thumbnails and cached web pages.
Add all that up, and you get "economies of scale," according to economist Stan Liebowitz in the Wall Street Journal. So in addition to content, advertising, and e-mail storage, Google commoditized lawsuits. [Wall Street Journal]
Me-too deals: Microsoft reaches an agreement with video search site Blinkx just as Google bought YouTube. What is Blinkx, other than a company named by the Borg? Well, it's about to become the engine for video search at MSN and Live.com. Blinkx uses sound recognition to scrape transcripts from video. Presumably, it's a killer move in the next step of Internet video. [Internet News]
The bubble: Several major news outlets asked, "Is this the sign of a bubble?" Today, Inc. asks it, then answers itself by pimping the founder of myYearbook.com. His site is growing faster than MySpace — not hard when all the kids are already on MySpace. So it's not Google blowing up the bubble here — it's the starry-eyed journalists depicting small businesses like this as the next Internet giants. [Inc.com]
Google's next buy: Despite rumors, an analyst says it's probably not Level 3, the fiber-optic network that just agreed to serve YouTube. Level 3 is currently worth $5.99 billion on the stock market. That's within Google's buying power, but it would be a big step toward a vertical monopoly for Google, as Level 3 currently serves all the top telecoms and Internet service providers. [Rocky Mountain News]
