Daily Archives: November 18, 2006

That YouTube deal

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From Techdirt…

Remember the rumor, kicked off by Mark Cuban, that Google was holding back $500 million from YouTube in escrow to deal with potential copyright infringement lawsuits? Yes, the same claim that Google CEO Eric Schmidt clearly denied was true last week. Well, it seems that when he called it false, it appears he only meant the number, not the concept. Today it came out that Google has actually put aside a little over $200 million in an escrow account, almost exactly as the original email Mark Cuban posted described. It’s to handle potential legal costs associated with copyright lawsuits. While it’s not nearly as much of the deal as originally suggested, it still is a significant chunk. There’s a second interesting tidbit in the article as well. While some had suggested that YouTube actually has been profitable, apparently, the company was so hard up for money, it needed to borrow $15 million between the time the deal was announced just over a month ago and its closing of the deal yesterday.

Sisters

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Tilly and Zoombini, on a chair in my study.

Tilly’s expression reminds me of two lines from the Irving Berlin song, Sisters, (from White Christmas):

Lord help the mister
Who comes between me and my sister.

LATER… Just noticed another picture of the two, taken in the summer,

and realised that Tilly invariably sits on her sister’s right.

Travelling light

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I’ve been through the new ‘security’ procedures at UK airports four times in the last fortnight. It’s getting to the stage where every passenger will have to strip naked before boarding a plane. The picture shows the scene at Stansted on a relatively quiet Sunday. On the left are the (relatively short) check-in queues. On the right, the queues for the security screening gates. Osama bin Laden has won, hands down.

The pleasures of pyromania

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Sean, contentedly contemplating his handiwork.

Last Sunday, he and I spent a happy morning setting fire to a large pile of tree and hedge clippings. Many newspapers were consumed in the process and, with superhuman restraint, we resisted the temptation to read articles that we had missed.

MySpace: the story continues

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From this morning’s New York Times…

The Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit yesterday against MySpace, the popular social networking Web site, for allowing users to upload and download songs and music videos.

The suit, which also names MySpace’s corporate parent, the News Corporation, comes as the recording industry contends with how to exploit its copyrighted material online. The issue has taken on more importance as services built around user-generated content become popular and generate advertising revenue.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, is seen as part of a strategy by Universal to test provisions of a federal law that provides a “safe harbor” to Internet companies that follow certain procedures to filter out copyrighted works. The law requires sites to remove such content after being notified by the copyright holder…