As if this wasn’t predictable enough. Earlier today, Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons stated that the world’s largest information and entertainment publisher was going to pursue copyright complaints against Google’s new toy, YouTube.
For the past year, music and entertainment companies have cried foul over the use of copyrighted content on popular social sharing sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Google Video. A quick visit to any of the three destinations will reveal thousands of copies of commercially protected materials. Did you miss Stewie’s impersonation of William Shatner interpreting Elton John’s Rocket Man? (Bleary-eyed ed. note: Eight minutes later and I am confused and uncertain of who has committed the greatest offense in this example.)
So what does this have to do with the business of search engine marketing?
Well, nothing directly. Indirectly however, we are watching the great sorting take place. This is history as it happens live. Monday’s announcement of Google’s acquisition of YouTube was a seminal event in the evolution of the Internet, signaling a radical increase in the availability and diversity of content types. Today’s announcement from Time Warner is the first in what is expected to be a series of legal challenges Google will be facing as a result of spending a billion and a half bucks on social-video networking.
The giants are fighting over who owns what and who has the right to publish, broadcast and otherwise disseminate commercially copyrighted content. The outcome of this and other similar fights will determine the rights and responsibilities webmasters will face in the future. In other words, this one bears watching.
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