More on Google YouTube

The anonymous person who alleged some evil deals as part of Google's acquisition of YouTube, which was posted on Mark Cuban's blog, may take heart that one of his claims has been confirmed. But it's the most innocuous of his claims.

From an AP story:

    Without elaborating in a statement late Monday, Google said it is withholding 12.5 percent of the     stock owed to YouTube for one year "to secure certain indemnification obligations."

This is one of the claims Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous posted:

> It didn't take a team of Harvard trained investment bankers to come up
> with the obvious solution and that is to set aside a portion of the
> buyout offer to deal with copyright issues. It's not uncommon in
> transactions to have holdbacks to deal with liabilities and Youtube
> knew they had a big one. So the parties (including venture capital
> firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase
> price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims.
> Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being
> disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.

So file this claim under info he got from talking to people involved in the deal. But as he says, this is not unusual. The worst claims, including the idea that Google told the media companies to sue competitors, still sounds like pure speculation to me, as I said before.

It's a shame Google can't comment on this. There are too many claims of evils from Google based on inaccurate information.

A more interesting post from Cuban  points out that YouTube essentially claims ownership of the videos posted (an opinion he also discussed here). That will screw up any protection from safe harbor rules protecting sites that merely act as a conduit for other people's postings. If YouTube/Google owns the offending videos, they can be sued.