Jan 03
The Web 2.0 love affair with Google may be coming to end. First they realise that Google is really their competition, now TechCrunch, a leading Web 2.0 advocate, receives a cease and desist letter from lawyers representing YouTube.
The problem?
“The offense we committed was creating a small tool that lets people download YouTube videos to their hard drives. We referenced the tool in a recent post that walked people through the process of moving YouTube Videos to their iPod“.
As Arrington notes:
“Of course, the irony of YouTube accusing others of copyright infringement is delicious. But I won’t go into that right now.“
Quite!
Jan 03
- Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $5 billion. Yahoo! paid a mind-boggling $710 per user back in the hey day of the bubble. But why does this rank higher than the AOL boondoggle? Two words: Mark Cuban. Yahoo’s ludicrous overpayment for Broadcast.com gave Cuban the money to go out and buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and permanently implant himself on the American psyche. Unforgivable.
- BlueMountain.com - acquired by Excite@Home in 1999. $780 million for an online greeting card site. ‘Nuff said.
I wonder what history will make of the YouTube acquisition? Google maintain that it will be a compliment to television, rather than a replacement.
Hmmm….I’m not so sure media companies will see it the same way. Particularly those who have already witnessed what a “compliment� to, say, newspapers means in reality 
I wonder if the media companies are going to get their own YouTube clone started?
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