YouTube sails away from Viacom in safe harbor

Google soberly* claimed victory over Viacom in a legal battle about copyrighted contents illegally uploaded on YouTube : removing them swiftly guarantees the portal a "safe harbor".

In Lingua Googla, the act of cleaning up the mess is reworded as "work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online". This is not policing but good editorial business.

In other words : Google, the piggyback media, is relegating Viacom into commodity categories. The real media is not Viacom but Google.

mot-bile 2010

* "YouTube wins case against Viacom"

Viacom - vae victis, YouTube

Viacom had better prove the importance of copyrighted content for YouTube users : the traditional media giant had its nextgen rival (now a Google brand) ordered by a NY judge to release user data, but at the bulk level. So no User-Generated Discontent ahead : John and Jane Doe shall remain anonymous criminals. And the blame (if any) on YouTube's broader shoulders. Or the shame on Viacom's, should the figures turn out to be disapointing.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, another safe was apparently cracked as the European Commission allowed NRAs to open for WiMAX part of the 2.6GHz spectrum devoted to FDD / TDD. Not the kind of news John and Jane Does love to download, but who knows, some may find some value in it.

aQuantive, the ad fad and the virtual estate bubble

DoubleClick @ Google = $3.1 Bn. RightMedia @ Yahoo! = $680 M. Real Media @ WPP = $649 M. aQuantive @ Microsoft = $6 Bn...
The Virtual Estate bubble keeps inflating. Six billion bucks, that's a lot of dough, even for Microsoft who never signed such a big check (except to its owners, that is). Besides, this QuadrupleClick extravaganza is equivalent to a 85% premium vs AQTN's Tuesday's closing price...
Is Redmond that desperate not to miss the next train and this discreet commuter living around the same station (aQ are based in Seattle, WA) ? At this price, they could even go for the real thing, a real adco.
Somehow, MSN's mother company was supposed to have at least some notions of advertising. Ditto Yahoo! & Co. One can wonder whether this really will add sense to Google, today's king of online advertising.
Well. For one thing, it was a matter of taking a fifth P, lifting a powerful leg to mark one's territory. And Razorfish (one of the franchises owned by aQuantive holdings) is not the smallest one in this pond. Actually, there was a competition raging for this prize.
Yet fundamentally, there is the necessity to distinguish the media from the advertising platform. In real life, Viacom enjoys strong positions both as a media and as an adco... but not on the very same turf either. That can be OK when you are a huge conglomerate with the ability to build Chinese Walls. But it can't work when you are used to grow following the microsoftian model.