James Delahunty
10 Nov 2006 8:08
Google Inc. has denied that a rumor detailing a $500 million reserve set aside by Google in its deal to acquire YouTube has any truth. The denial came form Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Tuesday at the annual Web 2.0 summit. The rumor had arisen from an anonymous blog post that claimed insider information about a legal reserve aimed to settle copyright claims brought against the company over content uploaded to YouTube by its users.
Billionaire Mark Cuban, who has been an outspoken critic of the Google-YouTube deal, published the rumor on his Blog Maverick site, saying he had not verified the details. Speaking to more than 500 industry insiders, Schmidt said the rumor was not true during an on-stage interview by conference organizer John Battelle.
In a two-part question, Battelle asked first if Google had a secret reserve for legal claims and secondly if Google was making progress striking deals with content owners. "The former is not true," Schmidt said. "The latter is. We have visited as many media companies as we can." YouTube's incredible success relies enormously on technically illegal content.
Many television and video producers along with recording labels have expressed anger at pirated copies of their content being uploaded to YouTube's servers every day.
Source:
Reuters