Mark Cuban repeated his belief that an eager horde of attorneys will take a beachhead in Mountain View and bombard the Googleplex with subpoenas until they find a copyright breach they can exploit with shareholder lawsuits for millions.
Cuban brings out some interesting points over Google’s purchase of YouTube, a story you may have seen mentioned once or twice…a second…all day long.
For one thing, Cuban thinks the next Google SEC filing will be a fun to peruse. “Think maybe how Google discloses what they perceive the copyright risk to be in the SEC filings might be an interesting read?” Cuban is referring to the usual slate of conditions attached to forward-looking statements in a company’s required filing of paperwork.
A few major providers of content (with equally major legal eagles in the roost) have signed on with YouTube and Google to permit them, or more accurately YouTube’s users, to include copyrighted works in the videos they upload.
In Cuban’s view, it could be a mid-level player that could drop the proverbial wrench in the works. “I think there will be subpoenas to get the names of YouTube and Google Video users,” he wrote. “Lots of them as those copyright owners not part of the gravy train go after both Google and their users for infringement.”
ZDNet’s George Ou provided a little historical perspective with regards to Cuban and selling an Internet property for 10 figures:
Cuban certainly knows a bad deal (good deal depending on whose perspective) when he sees one since he himself pulled off a 5.7 billion dollar sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo in the height of the dotcom boom and laughed his way to the bank.
Considering the fact that broadcast.com had nowhere near the user base and earning power of YouTube, one could see the 1.65 billion dollar sale of YouTube as a bargain.
After Cuban’s post, the SearchViews blog did some back of the envelope math about YouTube and other social media/networking sites that have been acquired:
It’s too early to comment on what this may or may not mean for Google Video, or to YouTube users, but the acquisiton is pretty amazing – both for its pricetag, and the speed to which it rose to those heights…..Based on our rough calculations, YouTube was able to grow its valuation by $2.6 million every day since its launch in February 05.
To quote SearchViews, “Wow.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
