The Viacom-Youtube battle is nothing but an attempt to sort out in court what the two could not settle behind closed doors.
On the one hand, it just proves that Google made a huge mistake paying 1.5B for a company with $15M in annual revenues and a whole bunch of copyrighted content. On the other it shows that the old media folks like Viacom are clueless on how to deal with the emerging Internet. “When you can’t compete, sue”.
What would make the entire playing field more interesting (not just for the law firms involved) would be if the two didn’t settle this out of court but instead dragged this into a long court battle, and in the mean time devised a viable alternate strategy to counter Youtube, Joost or otherwise.
In the meantime, I am going miss Jon Stewart clips on Youtube. So much for my bottom-line impact.
And Oh, btw, I still think Bollywood must unite and take a serious look at its clips on Youtube. Like I have said before it might be worth a shot.
Pakora Korner 