Billionare, tech guru, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has spent a great deal of time lately bashing YouTube and Google. Anyone who has read his blog might go so far as to say that he has become obsessed with the issue.
Perhaps the most notable of Cubans criticisms came before the Google buyout of YouTube when he wrote the following in an Oct 7th blog post – “Would Google be crazy to buy YouTube? No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime.”
Now it appears that Cuban might be willing to put his money where his mouth is.
According to CNET, Cuban is in the process of acquiring the Los Angeles News Service, a company owned by photojournalist Robert Tur. Interestingly enough, Tur is currently embroiled in a major lawsuit against YouTube for making money off of his copyrighted videos.
Even though YouTube insists that Tur’s lawsuit is without merit given the site’s policy to takedown videos on request, A Cuban backed LA News Service would be a formidable financial and legal foe.
In a November 14th blog post, Cuban writes on the YouTube vs Tur case: “To say the stakes are huge would be an understatement. The filing references a very interesting point. If you are under the safe harbor rules, and merely a conduit to others hosting files, how in the world could you give yourself a license to those files ? In other words, Youtube owns what you just uploaded, and can do anything they want with it, without limitation, but at the same time under the DMCA they want to be considered only a conduit that falls under the safe harbors . They cant have it both ways.”
The question remains, is Mark Cuban so determined to pick a fight and win against GooTube, that he will risk millions and millions of dollars to prove his point? It seems pointless to me, but then again it would be interesting to see them go head to head.
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