Google knew when they acquired YouTube last month that they were not only snapping up the future of TV, but also a massive amount of legal baggage. So it's not surprising to see a story in the FT last night stating that Google is frantically making payouts of "tens of millions of dollars" to the content companies. One unnamed film and TV company is receiving $100 million to license its content over a two-year period, according to the report.
Google has been holding talks with all the big names: CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal and News Corp, and an unconfirmed rumor says that $500 million of the $1.6 billion purchase price has been reserved for litigation. The story is being reported as if it's death or glory for YouTube, but I think most analysts have moved beyond the point of predicting YouTube's demise. The threat of lawsuits, however, is very real: yesterday the German soccer team Bayern Munich threatened to sue over YouTube's use of fan footage, and today the press wires are reporting that the English Premier League is also unhappy. The Premier League, however, isn't considering legal action: they're just demanding that the videos get taken down. Bizarrely, the most newsworthy lawsuit against YouTube isn't even about copyrights: it comes from the Utube tubing company, as mentioned earlier this week (Utube sues YouTube).
Mark Cuban, a strong YouTube critic who famously said "only a moron would buy YouTube", also made waves this week. He posted an unsubstantiated article that claimed the company not only bribed the music labels with massive payouts before the acquisition, but also requested that they didn't sue YouTube for 6 months, while encouraging them to sue YouTube's competitors - Grouper and Bolt.com, for instance. There's no evidence that the claims are accurate, however.