"Chill Out, Big Media, We're On It"

Eric Schmidt in a Reuters story today:

Google Inc., racing to head off a media industry backlash over its video Web site YouTube, will soon offer anti-piracy technologies to help all copyright holders thwart unauthorized video sharing, its chief executive said on Wednesday.

"We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies)," Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in an interview. "It is one of the company's highest priorities," he said.

"We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago," Schmidt told Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners. "It is going to roll out very soon ... It is not far away."

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:30 AM
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The War of Words Continues: "Mafia Shakedown"

That's what anonymous sources are calling YouTube/Google's approach (Reuters) to cutting deals with big media companies.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., plans to introduce technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users. But the tools are currently being offered as part of broader negotiations on licensing deals, they said.

The move contrasts with YouTube's biggest rival, News Corp.'s, popular Internet social network, MySpace, which said on Monday it would offer its own version of copyright protection services for free.

YouTube's "proposition that they will only protect copyrighted content if there's a business deal in place is unacceptable," a spokesman for Viacom Inc., owner of MTV Networks and Comedy Central, said this week.

Google counters that its technology requires cooperation with media partners, I can see their point. But I can only imagine the negotiations happening right now.

The Times has a piece on all this here - outlining the attempt to make a YouTube rival by NBC et al. From it:

It is hard not to conclude that the media establishment’s threats to start its own rival to YouTube — as well as Viacom’s yanking of its popular clips from the site — amount to posturing. What it might really be about is securing a lucrative deal from Google that would end hostilities in exchange for guaranteed cash and a healthy split of revenue from any advertising the company derives from their video content.

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:02 AM
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Google and Wikipedia

This augurs further action on the part of Google (via Digg). I can't imagine it will stand. From the original posting on Hitwise:

The percentage of Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.

Regardless of posturing, no business likes to send that much traffic to a third party site without some kind of value coming back. Will Wikipedia start running AdWords? Watch this space. I could imagine some kind of approach that drives revenue to the Wikimedia foundation....

• Posted by John Battelle at 10:10 AM
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I agree.

Fred notes Ted Stevens, Mr. "Series of Tubes!", is sponsoring a bill to ban blogs, social networks, and anything else conversational from schools and libraries. "An Idiot", Fred calls Ted. I agree.

(image)

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:13 AM
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The Search-Driven Election

Interesting post on who's buying keywords this early:

To my surprise, only five of the 17 presumed candidates have purchased keywords on search engines. And if you take a closer look, it’s the Republicans who are doing a significantly better job of using search to communicate with the electorate.

• Posted by John Battelle at 9:26 PM
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