Details in a second, but for the shortest attention spans, check out YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s victory dance, directed at Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, on Twitter:

Hey Philippe, wanna grab a beer to celebrate?! YouTube Again Beats Viacom’s Massive Copyright Infringement Lawsuitj.mp/ZCuWCQ

— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) April 18, 2013

Shortish version: Last year, Viacom convinced the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to make U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton review his 2010 ruling. He did, and finds that YouTube is still in the clear.

In essence, he argues that YouTube and its corporate owner Google enjoy broad protection against copyright violation claims because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — just like YouTube and Google have argued. Not surprisingly, Viacom says it will appeal.

Stanton’s decision is quite emphatic. In one of his choicest quotes, he dings Viacom for making its case based on “an anachronist, pre Digital Millennium Copyright Act concept.”

Also of note: Stanton’s decision frequently cites a different but parallel set of copyright case suits by Universal Music Group against Veoh, a now-defunct video service; judges in those cases have also sided in favor of Web aggregators versus copyright owners.

Here’s YouTube’s initial comment: “The court correctly rejected Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube, reaffirming that Congress got it right when it comes to copyright on the Internet. This is a win not just for YouTube, but for people everywhere who depend on the Internet to exchange ideas and information.” (Update: Here’s a YouTube blog post that says the same thing with more words.)

And here’s Viacom’s: “This ruling ignores the opinions of the higher courts and completely disregards the rights of creative artists. We continue to believe that a jury should weigh the facts of this case and the overwhelming evidence that YouTube willfully infringed on our rights, and we intend to appeal the decision.”

Here’s the ruling:

Viacom v. YouTube

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

If there’s one thing the co-founders of YouTube don’t need, it’s money (Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each made an estimated $300-plus million from selling to Google). But, in the form of their new company, AVOS Systems, they do seem to see the value in plugging into the venture capital system — and back into the Google system in particular — by accepting a Series A investment today from Google Ventures, NEA, Madrone Capital and Innovation Works.

On the VC side, the deal is obviously more about the team than about its current products. AVOS has been working on the challenge of reinvigorating Delicious, which it bought from Yahoo, and now is planning an upcoming digital magazine called Zeen.

AVOS said that Alex Kinnier of NEA, and Gideon Yu — who is now president of the San Francisco 49ers and was formerly at Khosla Ventures, YouTube and Facebook — would be joining its board.

That’s because AVOS today announced it is buying Trunk.ly “to accelerate link-saving and searching capabilities in Delicious,” said AVOS CEO Chad Hurley.

Trunk.ly is a two-man Australian social bookmarking start-up that earlier this fall flagged AVOS’ relaunched Delicious as “one step forward, two steps back.” (They weren’t the only ones being critical; many users were up in arms about lost features and underwhelming new stuff after AVOS took Delicious over from Yahoo.)

Trunk.ly, which was founded just under a year ago, will be shut down over the next two months and its co-founders will apply their know-how to Delicious.

Here’s the relevant portion of the critical blog post from September by Trunk.ly’s Alex Dong:

Two steps back

1) The main way to get links into delicious is still via bookmarklet. Given the high ratio of people using facebook and twitter, why should I manually bookmark a link if I have already retweeted it? Or liked it in my little walled garden?

Trunk.ly provides 10+ connectors into popular social networks. Setup once and links will start coming in automatically.

2) Lack of a solid social search. The playlist for the web is a great concept but will your interior “design” tag mean the same as my software “design” tag? Tagging as a device to build a taxonomy starts to collapse when people use same tag for different things. Quora solves this problem quite well by labouring out a taxonomy of its own.

Trunk.ly provides a search interface so essentially you have your own google for your links as well as your friends. There’s no need to tag – you can if you want, but you don’t have to in order to create value.

The social bookmarking service Delicious, now owned by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s AVOS, this week relaunched with some new features — and according to its existing users, too few of the old ones. And they seem to have pretty good cause for complaint.

Though Delicious’s six years being owned by Yahoo had resulted in little change and much neglect, loyal users saw the new Delicious team’s additions of playlist-like “Stacks” as no compensation for the removal of core RSS feed, browser extensions and tagging features. They spewed their anger in comment threads (like ours), on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and on Delicious.

You can fault the new Delicious team for rushing their launch and underestimating their users’ expectations, but at least they’ve spent the week responding across those mediums; they also added a new “beta status” blog and help account on Twitter. On Twitter alone, the team has sent hundreds of tweet responses to user complaints.

Asked to explain what the AVOS team was thinking, and whether they regretted the way it was done, spokesman Mike Manning replied, “We’ve been focused on making the transition from Yahoo happen as fast as possible. Because of this, we needed to reduce some functionality in the short term and introduce a basic set of new features to get the site out the door. From our standpoint, it’s a competitive market and we’re going to err on the side of speed versus perfection to hopefully build a larger, more compelling experience. We’ll always be listening to the community and will literally be updating the product on a daily basis.”

Now that the migration is complete, the new Delicious team is adding back key features and quashing bugs, Manning said. User tags have been restored, the various extensions have now been fixed, and unmigrated user data is filtering in. But there’s still plenty of stuff missing (for instance, posting links to Twitter and changing network privacy settings; see here), and many users who feel betrayed and say they’ve already switched to alternatives like Pinboard and Diigo.

I reached out to some of the users who had commented here about their dismay over the redesign, and asked whether they were satisfied with Delicious’s post-launch response. While it’s not a representative sample, those who replied said it was a matter of a certain favorite feature or two being restored, and they’re likely to continue using Delicious now that the features are coming back.

But at the same time, Delicious’s Manning said previous users are not the only ones on the company’s mind. “We chose to simplify the experience and refocus on making Delicious a mainstream destination to discover content,” he said.

“Mainstream” is obviously the key word there. Delicious had five million registered users as of 2008, when founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo. (Schachter, by the way, is also cranky about the changes.) While the user numbers have always been relatively small, this week’s outcry makes it clear that those people got value from the service. It’s yet to be seen whether the new “stacks” would ever inspire this kind of devotion.

Expectations aren’t terrifically high for the new Delicious, given the rareness of tech comeback stories and the fact that Delicious was never really that popular. But we can’t help but watch, given Hurley and Chen’s magic touch at YouTube.

The new Delicious retains a lot of visual elements from the old site, but it tweaks the core user activity to be about creating “stacks” of content. In an interview on Monday, Hurley compared stacks to YouTube playlists, saying he thinks the way to go mainstream is by enabling users to express their interests.

(Click to see a larger version of the fantastic “Dog Costumes That Should Be Illegal” stack pictured at right, and check out more screenshots and a demo video at the bottom of this post.)

Here’s a write-up of my chat with Hurley:

AllThingsD: How does it feel to be starting over again, and with a product many people have expectations for, rather than your own fresh new idea?

Chad Hurley: For the product — and for myself and Steve — we’re both starting over and we’re really excited about it. In Delicious’s case, it’s a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley. We look forward to providing a great service and hopefully introducing it to a bigger audience. From myself and Steve’s perspective, it feels good to be engaged again on finding a simple solution to a difficult problem, which is discovery.

How is this different from the original Delicious?

It became hard when people were adding all this information, tags and links. We’re applying a new layer of ways for people to explore the information. Relating to YouTube terms, playlists were an underappreciated feature of the site, and we saw an opportunity to introduce that concept in a broader sense against all media.

What of the old Delicious did you make sure to keep the same?

We’re keeping the brand and the logo and the utility — having a bookmarklet and all that will stay intact. We’re trying to add one layer of functionality, initially, to explore the links contributed on a daily basis. For us, this is really just the start. We have a lot more features waiting in the wings. We spent a lot of time rewriting the code, redoing the infrastructure and migrating the site over.

Do you think people have a fundamental desire to make lists and bookmark things?

With YouTube — with the Internet in general — you have information overload. The people who don’t necessarily get credit are the curators. We had the YouTube stars, but I always wanted to start a program called YouTube scouts.

It’s interesting that you’re emphasizing curation in a week when Facebook is pushing a new agenda of automated sharing.

At Facebook, they want as many signals in as possible, and that’s great, but right now it’s really noise. We’re really looking for the signal. It’s great to have passive links to share information, and I’m a fan of what they’re doing. I think people get burned out of actively participating. That’s what we did at YouTube, in a way — a really open viewing and sharing experience, where we never asked users to sign in. At Delicious, we’re trying to do that again here — people can get value without signing in.

Back to the original Delicious, there seem to have been a lot of services over the years from then to now that help you bookmark things and create lists. None of them in particular seem to have been that popular, though Pinterest seems to have been doing well lately. Why do you think the timing is right for you guys to pursue this?

There’s a lot of people working on this problem, a lot of people trying to address the problem of discovery and leveraging curation. We’re trying to create a broad functionality and audience. Some of these services are great, but they end up being restrictive. We want to celebrate diversity and we want a global audience with many different interests. This is just the initial stack we’re introducing on top of Delicious, and there will be many more features.

What are your plans to spread and grow the new Delicious, especially based on your experience of encouraging virality at YouTube?

I think actions speak louder than words. We want the product to hopefully grow on its own. We’ll do some traditional forms of marketing, but I feel if we have a compelling product that adds value, we’ll hopefully make it increasingly more attractive for people to spend their time with us.

The new Delicious sounds a lot like the old Delicious brought up to date. The upcoming design is reportedly aimed at solving “the information discovery problem” and will feature “stacks,” a.k.a. topical collections of content, as well as personalization features.

Chen and Hurley said that part of the charm of the endeavor lies in trying to revive one of the pioneering services of the social Web — though they weren’t necessarily big Delicious users the first time around.

Delicious is being rebuilt by a team of 15 in San Mateo, Calif., and is due to relaunch later this year. Chen and Hurley also bought social media analytics company Tap11 to incorporate into Delicious.

This year’s commemoration is more muted. Basically, just a blog post that notes that the site is really, really big.

How big, you ask?

• YouTube users are now uploading 48 hours of video a minute. That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions.
• YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.

But if you really want context for YouTube’s growth, go back and check out what it was doing in its first year: In December 2005–when Lazy Sunday first hit, and the site had become a mainstream success–viewers were watching 2.5 million videos a month.

And since we’re going back in time, here are three historically important YouTube videos:

Here’s the first clip ever uploaded to the site, back in April 2005, from little-known co-founder Jared Karim:

And here’s the clip uploaded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in October 2006, announcing that they’d sold the site to Google:

And here’s Tillman the dog, a 2007 video that showed up in Apple’s early iPhone commercials, and ended up becoming shorthand for the site’s user generated content.

Though the measurement techniques for these kinds of syndicated Web tools are in flux, the McLean, Va.-based Clearspring has more than one billion monthly unique visitors, which it says beats competitors such as ShareThis and Meebo.

Clearspring co-founder and CEO Hooman Radfar said his company opened this year with its first profitable quarter, and that it will bring in tens of millions in revenue annually, “tripling this year and accelerating.” Radfar attested that he doesn’t need the new funding to operate, but rather plans to spend it on acquisitions.

What does he want to buy? Start-ups that “leverage data and build audiences more efficiently,” Radfar said. “We’re trying to look at companies that are younger and earlier than us but don’t have millions to build the real-time infrastructure we’ve built.”

Radfar said that beyond its current advertising business, Clearspring is poised to take advantage of all the data about users and content that passes through its system. “Data is the most valuable outcome of the social web,” he said.

Interestingly, Radfar observed that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s new company AVOS, which bought Delicious and a social media marketing company, sounds like it’s heading down a similar path of analyzing real-time audience data.

Their first move is not an obvious one: they are buying the neglected remains of the Delicious social bookmarking site from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.

AVOS promises that Delicious users can continue to use the site after they accept a new privacy policy. The company’s first priority, according to an FAQ, is launching a new Firefox 4 extension.

Hurley and Chen, both immensely rich from their success with YouTube, are no longer running the Google-owned video site’s day-to-day operations. Chen left as CTO circa June 2009, while Hurley officially handed over CEO duties to Salar Kamangar in October 2010.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Founder Joshua Schachter is now running a new company, Tasty Labs. Yahoo had announced internally that it would “sunset” Delicious in December.

Here’s the full release and statement from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Statement
Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they have acquired the Delicious technology from Yahoo!. They plan to continue the service that users have come to know and love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.

Providing a smooth transition for users is important to both companies. There will be a transition period where users can elect to sign up for a new account. Users’ public and private bookmarks will be maintained through the transition period and transferred as they are today when it is complete.

As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop.

Press Release
YOUTUBE FOUNDERS ACQUIRE DELICIOUS FROM YAHOO!

Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content.

San Francisco, CA., – April 26, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

About Delicious
Delicious is the leading social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, Delicious has built a passionate, worldwide community of millions of users. In 2011, Delicious was acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Previously, they co-founded YouTube, the world’s largest video site in 2005, which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B. Delicious is part of AVOS, a new Internet company based in San Mateo, California.

Internet fame is fleeting. But techies with memories longer than their daily Twitter feeds probably recall some fuss last year over the Stanford University junior who created YouTube Instant–a riff on Google’s then-new instant search function.

Twitter went nuts. So did the hacker forums, and YouTube Instant earned creator Feross Aboukhadijeh over one million hits in 10 days, and a job offer from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley himself.

Aboukhadijeh didn’t take the job, and this morning, he and co-creator Jake Becker launched Instant.fm, a service that marries YouTube Instant to music playlist sharing, forming a mash-up so obviously cool that one wonders why Apple or YouTube haven’t done it already.

The idea is simple: drag a playlist from someplace, iTunes included, and Instant.fm queues up YouTube videos of the songs in the list, playing them in the playlist’s order.

“I wanted to make it the easiest place on the Internet to share a playlist,” said Aboukhadijeh.

Users can even make a playlist right on the site, and, in a few clicks, anyone within tweeting distance can be listening to the same songs.

Depending on the user’s needs, though, Instant.fm delivers a little more than just playlist sharing.

Users can hit play, blow up the YouTube window to full screen, and instantly have their own nightclub-style music video machine.

“You even get artist and song background info thanks to a few publicly available music information APIs,” Aboukhadijeh added.

The whole thing is fairly polished, especially compared to YouTube Instant, but a decent user interface doesn’t quite make Instant.fm an iTunes killer.

Instant.fm users are at the mercy of YouTube’s large but incomplete music video library. And depending on the quality of the uploaded video, the audio won’t be up to MP3 standards.

So, why give up the Silicon Valley dream of being another famous Stanford drop-out?

Aboukhadijeh said it wasn’t just about seeking more instant success.

“I definitely want to get my degree, and I guess right now I’m really excited about building things really fast and iterating,” he said.

As for the future, Aboukhadijeh is thinking a little larger about Instant.fm than he was about his first viral hit, even if he still has no plans to turn it into a business.

(In any case, he has accepted a summer internship at conversation start-up Quora.)

“If you think about it, playlists are just lists of your favorite songs. And if you add them all together, you get your music library,” said Aboukhadijeh. “So, eventually, you just have a whole library in your Web browser. I know there are a lot of cloud services trying to do the same thing, asking you to upload your mp3s, but we can do it easily.”

I met up with the excitable Aboukhadijeh, and co-creator Becker, on campus at Stanford University. Watch the video to hear the development story straight from the hackers’ mouths:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110422/early-adopter-from-the-hacker-who-brought-you-youtube-instant-instant-fm-launches-today/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101028/youtubes-chad-hurley-makes-it-official-hes-moving-from-ceo-to-advisor/ http://allthingsd.com/20101028/youtubes-chad-hurley-makes-it-official-hes-moving-from-ceo-to-advisor/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 00:57:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25214 YouTube CEO Chad Hurley plans to step down from his position and take on an advisory role, he announced at an industry event today.

The move will be a formal acknowledgment of a practical reality: The video site is already under the day-to-day control of Google veteran Salar Kamangar, and industry insiders have been speculating that Hurley would step out for more than a year. Hurley himself told TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters that he’s been a de facto advisor for the past two years.

Hurley’s departure means that all three of YouTube’s co-founders have moved on. Jawed Karim had left the company before Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in 2006, and Steve Chen left his spot as chief technology officer in the fall of 2008. No word on what Hurley’s next full-time gig will be.

UPDATE: Hurley’s official statement, released via Google tonight, reiterates what he’s already said onstage–”For the past two years, I’ve taken on more of an advisory role at YouTube as Salar Kamangar has led the company’s day-to-day operations. I will continue to serve in an advisory capacity and am excited to witness the next phase of YouTube’s growth.”

Here’s Hurley and Chen in what still may be my favorite YouTube video, shot shortly after they sold their start-up:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101028/youtubes-chad-hurley-makes-it-official-hes-moving-from-ceo-to-advisor/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/ http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/#comments Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:00:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23360 There are lots of ways to become famous on the Internet. It took Feross Aboukhadijeh three hours of coding.

When he was done, he had built “YouTube Instant,” a great riff on Google’s (GOOG) own Instant search service. On Thursday night he told a couple hundred friends about the site via Twitter, and from there it went to Y Combinator’s Hacker News, and then to this site, and then on to the rest of the Web.

So far, the most tangible benefit Aboukhadijeh has gotten from his instafame is a job offer, via Twitter, from YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. But the Stanford junior can’t take him up on it–he’s already working for Mark Zuckerberg, as a Facebook intern, working on something “really cool.”

Here’s more on Aboukhadijeh, via a quickie email interview we put together on Friday. He was a little time-pressed: In addition to class, and work at Facebook, he had to figure out how to keep his site running under a crush of traffic.

Peter Kafka: Great site. What’s the inspiration?

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I decided to do this after hearing about Google Instant. I thought that instant search for YouTube videos would be really cool. My roommate bet me that I couldn’t code it up in an hour. It ended up taking three hours, so he won the bet.

Kafka: What’s the goal here?

Aboukhadijeh: I think YouTube Instant makes sense if you’re looking for a serendipitous video browsing experience. It’s not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination. But I think this is perfect for many Internet users. :)

Kafka: What are you specializing in at Stanford?

Aboukhadijeh: I’m a Junior in the Stanford CS program. I’m interested in Internet technology, building Web sites, and computer security. I really enjoy building products that entertain and delight people, like YouTube Instant.

Kafka: Besides this, what’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?

Aboukhadijeh: I’ve been working at Facebook as a software engineer intern for the summer. Right now, we’re building something really cool that’s going to be released soon, but I can’t share any details because it’s top secret! :)

Kafka: I’m assuming you used the YouTube API to build this, correct? Any reaction from them so far?

Aboukhadijeh: I built YouTube Instant using a combination of the YouTube API and scraping YouTube search suggestions. No reaction from Google so far, but I think they’ll probably get a kick out of it. The YouTube CEO actually offered me a job on Twitter, he liked it so much.

I initially ran into some issues when Google automatically blocked my server for making too many repeated requests, but I just rewrote the site to query YouTube directly using Javascript on the client-side. This means that all the magic happens in each visitor’s browser, so it’s faster and Google can’t block it.

Kafka: What’s the plan after you graduate?

Aboukhadijeh: One day, I’d like to start a company that becomes the next Google and fundamentally changes the world for the better.

I like the ambition! Meanwhile I like YouTube Instant a lot. FYI, this classic is what the site suggests if you type in “Facebook”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20100623/youtube-ceo-chad-hurley-heres-my-viacom-victory-dance/ http://allthingsd.com/20100623/youtube-ceo-chad-hurley-heres-my-viacom-victory-dance/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:05:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20951 Viacom promises to appeal the summary judgment that Google (GOOG) has earned in the long-running YouTube/Viacom copyright case. So it’s possible that this thing will get bounced around a few more times before it gets resolved.

Still, today’s news is a decisive, clear-cut victory for the giant video site. So you can understand why YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley wanted to perform a little victory dance this evening, via Twitter:

If you’ve spent any time at all on YouTube–or on the Internet, for that matter–you can probably guess where that link brought you:

Equal time! Here’s a less ebullient response from Viacom (VIA), via chief lawyer Michael Fricklas:

We are disappointed with the judge’s ruling, but confident we will win on appeal.

Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries. It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others. Without this protection, investment in the development of art and entertainment would be discouraged, and the many artists and producers who devote their lives to creating it would be hurt. Copyright protection is also critical to the web–because consumers love professional content and because legitimate websites shouldn’t have to compete with pirates.

YouTube and Google demonstrated that required tools to limit piracy aren’t impossible to find or even that difficult to implement–they fixed the problem of rampant piracy on YouTube after Viacom filed this lawsuit.

Before that, however, YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars. We believe that should not be allowed by law or common sense.

This case has always been about whether intentional theft of copyrighted works is permitted under existing law and we always knew that the critical underlying issue would need to be addressed by courts at the appellate levels. Today’s decision accelerates our opportunity to do so.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100623/youtube-ceo-chad-hurley-heres-my-viacom-victory-dance/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/ http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:30:39 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17601 There’s no smoking gun in the YouTube-Viacom papers, but there is some great stuff. Like these documents, which offer an unprecedented look at the finances behind the world’s most successful video site.

I’m not exactly sure why Viacom dug up YouTube’s profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet from its pre-Google days, but I’m glad it did. You can see the entire thing, which covers YouTube’s birth in the spring of 2005 through August 2006, at the bottom of this post.

But these excerpts give you a very good snapshot of what was going on in the company’s early days–hypergrowth, followed, eventually, by revenue (click to enlarge):

Some context: Chad Hurley registered the YouTube domain in February 2005, but the site wasn’t up and running for a few more months. Co-founder Jared Karim uploaded YouTube’s first video, “Me at the zoo,” in late April 2005.

By December 2005, users were uploading 6,000 clips a day, and the site was streaming 2.5 million videos a day. By February 2006, those numbers had jumped to 20,000 and 18 million, respectively. In July 2006, YouTube users uploaded 2.1 million clips and watched three billion of them.

Which explains the skyrocketing Web-hosting bills. But do note the burst of revenue from direct sales in August 2006, which allowed the company to generate a gross profit. A lot of people assumed that YouTube had to find a buyer like Google (GOOG) a few months later because it couldn’t pay its own bandwidth bills. But these numbers suggest that this may not be the case.

Also of note for Web video and Web ad nerds/historians: Check out the detailed breakdown of YouTube’s ad revenue and hosting costs, both real and projected, circa December 2005.

youtube pl

balance sheet

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100319/the-numbers-behind-the-worlds-fastest-growing-web-site-youtubes-finances-revealed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100318/youtube-and-viacom-find-lots-of-emails-but-no-smoking-gun/ http://allthingsd.com/20100318/youtube-and-viacom-find-lots-of-emails-but-no-smoking-gun/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:25:33 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17580 The YouTube-Viacom documents released today are chock full of interesting morsels. Feel free to ignore most of them.

Because if you’re trying to handicap the way the copyright lawsuit pans out, today’s document dump won’t do much to help you. There are revelations here, but they’re of the minor and historical variety, and I’ll get to some of them later.

No smoking gun, though. Just a lot of chest-beating and desk-thumping as both sides talk past each other.

Still, it does make for fun reading if you’re of a certain troubled mindset. If you’re not, here’s a summary:

Viacom’s case: YouTube was full of content that wasn’t supposed to be there, and both YouTube and Google knew it.

Of course they knew it! Anyone who visited the site in 2005 and 2006 knew it. The problem was what to do about it.

And that’s the most interesting part of the emails and IM exchanges Viacom has dug up: They let you watch YouTube’s co-founders, and later, Google executives, argue over the best way to keep the site growing like a weed while fending off the lawyers.

Actually, they knew the lawyers would show up eventually. “Ok man, save your meal money for some lawsuits! ;) no really, I guess we’ll just see what happens,” co-founder Chad Hurley tells partners Steve Chen and Jawed Karim via email in July 2005, as the three men decide to leave some copyrighted stuff on the site.

As as YouTube boomed, Google (GOOG) was trying to figure out how its lackluster Google Video site could compete. The big debate, according to former executive David Eun: “Whether we should relax enforcement of our copyright policies in an effort to stimulate traffic growth, despite the inevitable damage it would cause to relationships with content owners.”

Google’s eventual answer, of course, was to buy YouTube. But it went in with open eyes. A due diligence report estimated that just 10 percent of the “premium” stuff on the site was authorized.

Google’s case: Viacom–which talked about buying YouTube–was perfectly happy to use our site to market its movies and TV shows. Until it wasn’t.

Of course it was! In 2005 and 2006, all of the entertainment companies were desperately trying to get their clips in front of the site’s huge audience. Even more so at Viacom (VIA), whose youthful audience was spending lots of time on YouTube.

And the fact that Viacom executives, who had lost MySpace to Rupert Murdoch (remember when MySpace was a world-beater?), were thinking about buying YouTube–in part so Murdoch wouldn’t get it–shouldn’t be surprising, either.

Google makes a lot of the fact that Viacom “secretly” uploaded videos to YouTube, either via its employees or from marketing shops it hired. But I don’t get the impression that the “secret” uploads were supposed to dupe YouTube. I get the impression they were trying to dupe YouTube users into thinking the videos were edgy and cool.

“The goal is to make it look “hijacked,” an executive at Viacom’s Spike network told the producers of a mixed martial arts show, describing a video he gave them so that they could seed it on YouTube. The idea was to make the clip “look as though it was leaked out by production.”

Viacom’s embrace of YouTube does bolster Google’s case in one way. Google shows, fairly effectively, that Viacom’s lawyers have had a hard time figuring out which YouTube clips the company authorized. If Viacom can’t figure out what’s supposed to be on the site, Google argues, how do you expect YouTube employees to know?

So. Strip out all of the depositions, documents and emails, and we’re back to where we started. This case will hinge on the way the court decides to interpret federal copyright law.

Viacom argues that YouTube is a video version of Napster or Grokster–designed to profit from intellectual property it knows is stolen. And Google argues that it’s doing exactly what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act tells it do–asking its users to behave, hoping they do, and taking down offending clips when their owners ask them to.

So pay attention to that ruling–it’s going to be really important. But unless you’re paid to keep an eye on digital media, you can ignore most of today’s paperwork.

[Image credit: Michele Hubacek]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100318/youtube-and-viacom-find-lots-of-emails-but-no-smoking-gun/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100318/who-got-the-loot-how-youtube-split-up-googles-billions/ http://allthingsd.com/20100318/who-got-the-loot-how-youtube-split-up-googles-billions/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:42:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17564 Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube is perhaps the best-known transaction of the Web 2.0 era. Here, via court documents filed in the YouTube-Viacom case, is how some of that money got split up:

• $516 million to Sequoia Capital, which invested $9 million in the company
• $334 million to co-founder Chad Hurley
• $301 million to co-founder Steve Chen
• $85 million to Artis Capital, which invested $3 million
• $66 million to co-founder Jawed Karim

These numbers are all from documents filed by Viacom (VIA); they also indicate that five other YouTube employees received shares worth a total of $33.4 million.

Bear in mind that these numbers are based on the closing price of Google’s stock on Nov. 13, 2006. Google (GOOG) shares have bounced around dramatically since then, so the actual value of the payout could vary quite a bit depending on when–or whether–recipients sold their shares.

Why is any of this relevant to the case? Viacom’s suggestion is that YouTube’s employees and investors were focused on a big payout and wanted to build the company quickly–and that they were willing to accept copyright violations if that helped them achieve their goal. Again, not sure if this will matter in the court’s eyes.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100318/who-got-the-loot-how-youtube-split-up-googles-billions/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100318/viacom-youtube-make-their-case-read-their-secret-papers-here/ http://allthingsd.com/20100318/viacom-youtube-make-their-case-read-their-secret-papers-here/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:15:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17535 UPDATE: Here’s my summary of the documents — great morsels, no smoking gun.

And we’re off! Court filings in the YouTube-Viacom suit were just unsealed and both sides are distributing them now.

This post will be a work in progress as I ingest the paperwork. I’ll link to places where you can sort through the files for yourself, and I’ll be posting what I can on this site as well. Most important, I’ll try to interpret the documents and pull out the most interesting stuff.

As we start, a reminder of what we’re looking at: Both sides are releasing their legal arguments and supporting evidence in the three-year-old case. In short, Viacom (VIA) says that Google’s (GOOG) video site infringed on its copyright and wants a billion dollars in damages; YouTube says the site is protected by federal law.

Slightly longer version: Viacom is arguing that YouTube is a giant version of Napster and Grokster, the music file-sharing sites knocked down in earlier court rulings. That makes it important for the cable network to show that YouTube executives knew users were uploading licensed work and that the executives were encouraging it.

YouTube, meanwhile, is arguing that the company has always tried to discourage users from uploading licensed stuff and has gone to great lengths to take down stuff that copyright owners don’t want there. The video service also argues that Viacom has uploaded plenty of its stuff to YouTube on its own and continues to do so. Key part of Google’s defense, in plain English:

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube–and every Web platform–to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

It’s important to remember that all of this is already old news to the U.S. District Court judge who will rule in the case. While this may seem like a reality show, the public doesn’t get a vote on this one.

Now let’s get to the filings. Here is Viacom’s request for summary judgment, followed by its “statement of undisputed facts”–essentially supporting evidence. Viacom is also posting most of the documents and depositions here, though some items have been redacted.

Viacom Summary Judgment Motion –

Viacom Statement of Undisputed Facts –

And here’s a link to YouTube’s statement. The company’s legal memorandum follows:

20100318_google_viacom_youtube_memorandum

Below is a statement from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, which amounts to a legal version of a press release. Note the many references he makes to his desire to keep the site free of copyrighted stuff–at least initially.

C Hurley Declaration –

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100318/viacom-youtube-make-their-case-read-their-secret-papers-here/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100121/boomtown-heads-to-sundance-film-festival-in-the-fifth-annual-meet-the-geeks-pilgrimage/ http://allthingsd.com/20100121/boomtown-heads-to-sundance-film-festival-in-the-fifth-annual-meet-the-geeks-pilgrimage/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:19:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23327

Today, BoomTown is loading the wife and kids, along with mom, into our tricked-out All Things Digital Winnebago and heading to Park City, Utah, for the 26th Sundance Film Festival.

Now, what I know about independent filmmaking could fit neatly into a thimble, with room to spare.

But what has brought me back there for five years running is the chance to introduce those auteurs gathered on the frozen tundra to a slice of what’s to come from the digital world–for Sundance’s terrific New Frontier on Main series.

Increasingly, that matters a lot to those who make movies, especially those associated with smaller film efforts that might never see the light of a theater projector.

Thus, the tech sessions at Sundance are packed to the gills, with huge crowds turned away, because Hollywood knows what’s coming, and it has increasingly less control over it.

Imagine, for example, what the Apple (AAPL) tablet will mean to media giants in relation to entertainment distribution. And exactly how might you tell a story on a smartphone? Or not!

They can’t say they were not warned.

Last year, I interviewed a trio panelists: Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of the Google (GOOG) video service YouTube; Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, the premium online video service and joint venture among News Corp. (NWS), Disney (DIS) and GE’s (GE) NBC Universal; and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix (NFLX), the largest online DVD rental service, which has been moving into an ever wider range of movie distribution on the Web.

This year, my panel–which takes place Friday at noon and runs 90 minutes–is titled: “Spotlight on Social Media: Successful Strategies for Storytellers.”

Here’s the description:

“Today’s social media sites have the potential to bring content creators closer to audiences than ever before–creating new marketing opportunities for independents. But what more can be achieved? Can we create meaningful experiences through our profiles pages, or is it all just self-promotional clutter? Are the popular sites we use today the end of the line, or just a peek into the future?”

In other words: Will Twitter’s 140-character influence murder all creativity? Or just bruise it a little bit?

The subjects of my prying interview questions on this important issue include Robert Tercek, president of digital media for OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network; filmmaker Ondi Timoner; Chris Gebhardt, head of Participant Media’s TakePart social media platform; David Eun, head of film partnerships for YouTube; MySpace’s Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn; and Matt Jacobson, Facebook’s market development dude.

Whatever that means, since the hot Silicon Valley social networking site has done little in the way of storytelling as yet and much more in the way of pokes!

But, as ever, I shall strive to drag answers about innovation and more out of the lot of them.

Video to come, of course!

So, until I get there and thaw out the Flip digital video camera, here is my longish video from last year with the panelists, as well as cameos from my kids and once-indie film star and now TV hit queen Jane Lynch.

And below that, my 2008 Sundance video featuring Lynch and MySpace co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe.

And if you want to know even more about Sundance, there is a new app on the iPhone for the festival. It costs $4.99, with the proceeds benefiting the not-for-profit Sundance Institute.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100121/boomtown-heads-to-sundance-film-festival-in-the-fifth-annual-meet-the-geeks-pilgrimage/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100104/oh-my-god-they-still-havent-deposed-kenny/ http://allthingsd.com/20100104/oh-my-god-they-still-havent-deposed-kenny/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:20:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14696 Yup, Viacom and Google are still locked in a high-stakes court battle over YouTube, copyright law and money.

It’s hard to remember this conflict sometimes because it started all the way back in the spring of 2007, after Google offered $500 million to appease Sumner Redstone and company, then thought better of it. Viacom countered with a billion-dollar lawsuit claim, which has been dragging its way ever so slowly through the legal system since then.

The latest reminder: A report from CNET pointing out that Google (GOOG) has deposed Viacom (VIA) employees Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but that “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have yet to hand over documents the search giant’s lawyers have requested.

“The missed deadline isn’t amusing to Google,” Greg Sandoval relays.

This is theoretically important because both sides are trying to prove that their opponents’ employees knowingly uploaded copyrighted clips to the site.

If Viacom can prove that Chad Hurley and company were doing it, it bolsters its claim that YouTube knew it was violating copyright law and didn’t do anything about it. If Google can prove that “The Daily Show” or “South Park” dudes were doing it, it can argue that it’s impossible to tell when it was okay to run Viacom clips and when it was verboten.

Alas, in a slow-motion case like this, it’s impossible to imbue any particular move with particular weight. For instance: Google’s interest in deposing Stewart et al dates all the way back to August 2007. So the fact that the company’s lawyers have talked to him recently means that…it has talked to him recently.

Still, it does give us a chance to play the classic “South Park” YouTube tribute clip–legally, I should add.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100104/oh-my-god-they-still-havent-deposed-kenny/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091222/jimmy-kimmel-norah-jones-and-youtubes-12-days-of-christmas/ http://allthingsd.com/20091222/jimmy-kimmel-norah-jones-and-youtubes-12-days-of-christmas/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:53:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=14346 How do you get a video to go viral on YouTube? One tried-and-true method: Rely on other videos that have gone viral on YouTube.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt if you got it on national TV. And if you got YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to give you a shout-out on Twitter.

Still, this Jimmy Kimmel clip of a duet with Norah Jones has been on Google’s (GOOG) video site for five days now, and it has racked up a mere 57,468 views. Go figure. I like it, anyway:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091222/jimmy-kimmel-norah-jones-and-youtubes-12-days-of-christmas/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/ http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:32:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21168 This Thursday, my All Things Digital partner, Walt Mossberg, and I are hosting–for the seventh year running–the annual “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” program for the Churchill Club.

This year, our guest “tech geek” celebs–drawn from the gadget-mad players of Silicon Valley–are Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer, the social networking site’s VP of Engineering (pictured here).

In fact, Sandberg was scheduled to be our guest last year but had a last-minute snafu, so Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams filled in for her.

Among others, past geek celebs have included Google (GOOG) co-founder Larry Page, Yahoo (YHOO) co-founder Jerry Yang and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.

Also along for the ride is our regular gadget freak, Greg Harper, president of HarperVision Associates and co-founder of Gadgetoff, who brings new meaning to the term. (He also packs so much hardware and software that he is on the TSA’s list.)

The evening starts at 6 pm with a buffet dinner at the Crowne Plaza Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif. That’s followed by the program, in which each of us shows off some of our favorite innovative or just plain weird gadgets, while the others opine on the selections.

You can sign up early online or get a pricier ticket at the door.

Here’s a rather longish video from last year, which is well worth watching for the animatronic Elvis alone:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091130/dont-miss-the-annual-gadgetfest-at-churchill-club-thursday-featuring-facebook-celeb-geeks/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20091103/dont-tell-a-soul-media-tech-moguls-take-manhattan-for-semi-secret-quadrangle-conference/ http://allthingsd.com/20091103/dont-tell-a-soul-media-tech-moguls-take-manhattan-for-semi-secret-quadrangle-conference/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:00:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=12666 Wouldn’t you like to bump elbows with media moguls and hear from the likes of Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and News Corp. (NWS) scion James Murdoch? Me too!

Alas, the Foursquare conference, hosted by the Quadrangle PE fund, is an invitation-only affair. And the event, which kicks off tomorrow, is closed to the press except for reporters onstage to interview the stars. And those conversations don’t get released to the public.

That’s a particular bummer this time. Because the Quadrangle guys–who have had a rough year–had the foresight to get a lineup that includes GE (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt, who appears to be in the final stages of selling NBC Universal to Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts, who will also be onstage. Sure would be nice to hear what they say.

Another panel that piques my interest, if only because of the title: “Are Popularity and Profitability Correlated?” It features Twitter’s Stone, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. And would-be moguls are represented by a start-up pitch panel that includes Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, the superbuzzy mobile service whose name has nothing to do with Quadrangle’s conference.

So once again, here’s the complete list of those you won’t be hearing from this week as they gather at the Plaza in Manhattan. Unless, perhaps, one of my more ambitious colleagues sneaks in–I’m thinking of you, Bobby MacMillan–and gets us a first-hand account.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091103/dont-tell-a-soul-media-tech-moguls-take-manhattan-for-semi-secret-quadrangle-conference/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091009/the-secret-of-chad-hurley-and-steve-chens-famous-two-kings-video-revealed/ http://allthingsd.com/20091009/the-secret-of-chad-hurley-and-steve-chens-famous-two-kings-video-revealed/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:00:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11917 Remember the era-defining video Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made three years ago? The one where they looked simultaneously giddy, groggy, and perhaps a tiny bit intoxicated, and announced that they had sold their video site to Google for $1.65 billion?

That clip, it turns out, is an unlikely homage to…wait for it…the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy. Really!

Go ahead and look at the first two clips at the bottom of the post. Note Hurley’s reference to “salt and pepper” and “two kings getting together.” See? In the Diddy clip, too. Who knew? (Okay, so at least one of you did).

Anyway, Hurley references both clips in a blog post he published this morning commemorating the anniversary of the sale. He also announced that the site is now serving up “well over” one billion video views per day. Last month comScore (SCOR) estimated YouTube was doing 10 billion views per month in the U.S.

And there’s also some general talk about the site’s evolution: Rather than focus solely on short clips, it’s also working to bring in movies and TV shows, etc. Nothing you didn’t know already.

Expect to hear more meaningful–but equally upbeat–talk about the site’s progress next Thursday, when Google (GOOG) announces its Q3 earnings.

Last quarter, Google executives went out of their way to talk up the site, and CFO Patrick Pichette said YouTube could start generating significant profits soon. This week, CEO Eric Schmidt also made a point of praising the YouTube deal and the site’s performance during a New York press conference.

Here, once again, is that famous clip:

And here’s the one Hurley was apparently referencing:

And here, once again, is the most popular clip in YouTube’s history:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091009/the-secret-of-chad-hurley-and-steve-chens-famous-two-kings-video-revealed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091006/report-leaked-e-mails-zing-youtube-in-viacom-copyright-suit/ http://allthingsd.com/20091006/report-leaked-e-mails-zing-youtube-in-viacom-copyright-suit/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:17:10 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11758 Viacom has been rummaging through Google and YouTube records for more than a year as part of its $1 billion copyright lawsuit. Did it get what it was looking for?

Maybe, says CNET’s Greg Sandoval. He reports that Viacom’s attorneys have unearthed emails that indicate that YouTube employees uploaded copyrighted material to the site and that “managers” knew there was copyrighted stuff on the site but didn’t do anything about it.

Those allegations happen to be key parts of Viacom’s (VIA) suit against Google (GOOG) and YouTube, and a good part of what the company has been looking for in the discovery/deposition process that has stretched on for more than a year and is slated to extend through the end of 2009.

Viacom has argued that senior YouTube employees, including cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, knew full well that their site was full of copyrighted material and not only didn’t try to prevent it, but at some point even encouraged it.

So what exactly do the emails say? I don’t know. Sandoval is summarizing the documents, not reproducing them. And if I’m reading his story correctly, he may not have seen them either, but may be relying on someone else’s description of them. (That said, in a separate story, Sandoval does reproduce parts of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s deposition from the same case.)

Here’s his description:

Lawyers working on a $1 billion copyright lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube may have uncovered evidence that employees of the video site were among those who uploaded unauthorized content to YouTube.

In addition, internal YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on the site with employees but chose not to remove the material, three sources with knowledge of the case told CNET.

The e-mails, according to the sources who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing litigation, surfaced during an exchange of information between the two sides of the legal dispute.

I’ve asked Sandoval for more information about the emails he’s referring to, but I don’t expect him to say much; anyone who released documents from discovery would be violating a court order. Viacom had no comment. Here’s YouTube’s comment, via CNET: “The characterizations of the supposed evidence, made in violation of a court order, are wrong, misleading, or lack important context and notably come on the heels of a series of significant setbacks for the plaintiffs. The evidence will show that we go above and beyond our legal obligations to protect the rights of content owners.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091006/report-leaked-e-mails-zing-youtube-in-viacom-copyright-suit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090910/youtubes-sea-of-red-ink-downgraded-to-great-lake-status/ http://allthingsd.com/20090910/youtubes-sea-of-red-ink-downgraded-to-great-lake-status/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:00:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=10827 Remember when the analysts at Credit Suisse decided that YouTube was losing close to half a billion dollars a year? That was then–five months ago, to be precise–and this is now: Those same analysts estimate that Google’s video site is losing a mere…$410 million a year.

That’s still not going to appease the folks at YouTube, who take umbrage at the assumptions analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena make when assessing the site’s financials.

But until the YouTube guys can provide the outside world with concrete numbers about their costs, sales, etc.–which they may never do–they’ll have to deal with a variety of guesses.

For what it’s worth, what’s changed here are the analysts’ guesstimates about YouTube’s bandwidth costs: They used to think the site was plowing through $360 million to deliver all those clips; now they think the number is $300 million. They’ve left all their other estimates unchanged.

Meanwhile, some perspective: Google’s YouTube adventure is still less than three years old. The “two kings,” as co-founder Chad Hurley put it in this video, only got together in October 2006.

[Image credit: greeblie]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090910/youtubes-sea-of-red-ink-downgraded-to-great-lake-status/feed/ 0