The Beginning of the End of YouTube Beginning
Ever since the Google/YouTube buyout was at its rumor stages, Mark Cuban wouldn't shut up about how it was going to be a legal land mine, and while we have yet to see a lawsuit against Google, he has been kinda right as takedown requests are happening more frequently than pre-buyout.
But here's a new one - a user being asked to remove copyrighted material from their own website. No, not video that he uploaded, but video that he found on YouTube and embedded on a blog. A firm representing The Premier League, England's top soccer league, sent a letter of warning to 101greatgoals, telling the blogger to take down YouTube videos whose copyrights belong to the Premier League.
Now, as much as we understand the copyright issues at work, we depend on YouTube for our soccer fix and we wonder if the Prem is not shooting itself in the foot by resisting a potentially effective word-of-mouth marketing tool. But the bigger question here is what this could mean for blogs like, say, Deadspin, whose most popular content often comes from contraband footage from YouTube.
But the best part about the BBC article? It reminds readers that beginning next season, the BBC website will simulcast all matches televised on the network, so they'll have to come to the Beeb for all the highlights that would theoretically be banned from YouTube. Not even BBC is immune from corporate synergy, it appears.
Goal footage warning for website [BBC]
Correction: GoogTube most certainly is fighting a lawsuit, albeit one that Google inherited from YouTube.