You Tube!

So when u say "Google" what comes first to your mind..

• Yet another dot com
• Biggest website and search engine in the world
• Two innocent people harnessing technology and saying Don't be Evil

or may be something else, but the matter of fact is that this Don't be Evil enterprise may not be a true angel.

It was an October evening when Google decided to take over YouTube with $1.65 billion, which is the talk of the town today. Though I accept that it was a fair deal, to fill up the pockets from this successfully running dot com, but still do you really think that buying YouTube was that much justified for a company like Google?

Viacom on Tuesday slapped YouTube and parent company Google with a lawsuit, accusing the wildly popular video-sharing site of "massive intentional copyright infringement" and seeking more than $1 billion in damages. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's entertainment programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.YouTube has deliberately withheld the application of available copyright protection measures in order to coerce rights holders to grant it licenses on favorable terms," according to the complaint.
-March 13, 07

the News Corp. unit subpoenaed YouTube for the identities of two users who had allegedly posted as-yet-unaired episodes of the popular show 24 because it was "interested in protecting full episodes of our series that we have yet to monetize

And the list goes on.. CBS, Fox News, the National Basketball Association, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group and recently the BBC. Although Google has negotiated with these entertainment companies to close the matter. I think probably those two innocent youngsters (Larry and Brin) have grown up into the professionals. All they want is to make Google the most successful enterprise of all times. "YouTube has deliberately chosen not to take reasonable precautions to deter the rampant infringement on its site," Viacom said in its complaint. "Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos."

If you don't know YouTube is a video sharing website that is based on an antique law written long before video-sharing Web sites were envisioned. The law is, of course, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which made its appearance in the U.S. Congress in July 1997.

So what do u think of Google now. What does it want to prove from running YouTube under the
aim of developing the videos sharing market online. Despite of all these controversies against YouTube, it is still running at its full strength, maybe because it is filling up the pockets of Google by handsome advertisement revenue it makes. And this in turn is because of the availability of the popular (legal n illegal) videos which attract most of its visitors. I see no reason for it to continue with YouTube except for the sake of revenue. May be the upcoming JV among two leading media companies, NBC Universal and News Corp along with the support from Yahoo, AOL and MSN, would bring up something better and enhanced tha YouTube. But for that we will have to wait atleast till this summer.

So probably it is right to say that Google needs to change its motto to "Do no Evil until you are earning a lot".