I was directed by The Deal to an interesting Fortune article by Adam Lashinsky. It's worth reading in full for Mr. Lashinsky's delightful cynicism regarding the sudden billionaires, but I must run one excerpt:

First as a private company and now as an arm of a public company, YouTube enjoys the luxury of reporting only the statistics it chooses to. Hurley divulges neither the percentage of videos on YouTube that use copyrighted music that doesn't belong to the video creator nor the number of takedown notices YouTube receives from entertainment companies. (Under federal law, YouTube is required to remove content at the request of its rightful owners but isn't obligated to do so proactively. Google, you might recall, tells book publishers it'd be happy to exclude their books from Google's book search results - if they ask. GooTube sounds like a beautiful relationship already.) Hurley, by the way, told the FT three weeks ago they "don't have numbers" on takedown notices. He told me he knows but isn't saying. Details, details.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 4:27 PM | DMCA

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