AfterDawn: News

Google denies having YouTube legal reserve

Google Inc. has denied that a rumor detailing a $500 million reserve set aside by Google in its deal to acquire YouTube has any truth. The denial came form Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Tuesday at the annual Web 2.0 summit. The rumor had arisen from an anonymous blog post that claimed insider information about a legal reserve aimed to settle copyright claims brought against the company over content uploaded to YouTube by its users.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, who has been an outspoken critic of the Google-YouTube deal, published the rumor on his Blog Maverick site, saying he had not verified the details. Speaking to more than 500 industry insiders, Schmidt said the rumor was not true during an on-stage interview by conference organizer John Battelle.



In a two-part question, Battelle asked first if Google had a secret reserve for legal claims and secondly if Google was making progress striking deals with content owners. "The former is not true," Schmidt said. "The latter is. We have visited as many media companies as we can." YouTube's incredible success relies enormously on technically illegal content.

Many television and video producers along with recording labels have expressed anger at pirated copies of their content being uploaded to YouTube's servers every day.

Source:
Reuters

Written by: James Delahunty @ 10 Nov 2006 8:08

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• 4 comments

• ZippyDSM

  I bet they don't ya..and I have 2 WEE's in my pants....of corase they do if they do not they will start bleeding money when teh MAFAA starts the anal carnage....

  10.11.2006 13:17 #1

• georgeluv

  they would have to be fools to not have a huge stockpile of money to fight off the copywrite horders. its been said before: google didnt spend 1.6 bil on youtube just for its technology, they did it to make loads of money later. google knows ad revenue and marketing data are whats going to be the big return from youtube. nobody visit youtube if they cut out all the good stuff, youtube wont stay number three in hits if all it has to offer is a bunch of redneck home videos.

  10.11.2006 14:33 #2

• borhan9

  Thats just too much money to play with these days :). I just wanted to say i saw the video of the 2 cops bashing that suspect of some sort and loved how YouTube has caught them in the act. Well done :)

  10.11.2006 21:02 #3

• rav0

  They denied holding back $500 million, because the real escrow amount is $200 million.

  18.11.2006 15:39 #4