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Gordon's Republic

Google takes a swipe at Viacom/talks Facebook

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It's getting heated in the legal battle between Google and Viacom over YouTube copyright violations as the Google chief takes a swipe at 'lawyer'-run firms.
Google, of course, is being sued for $1bn by Viacom over copyright infringement where users have uploaded Viacom content (from Paramount and MTV) onto YouTube. The shows involved include the likes of 'The Daily Show with John Stewart' and 'South Park'.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking with reporters at a hotel bar at the 25th annual Allen & Co moguls meeting, did not mince his words.

"Viacom is a company built from lawsuits, look at their history. Look who they hired as CEO, Philippe Dauman, who was the general counsel for Viacom for 20 years," Schmidt said.

Schmidt made reference to a previous multibillion-dollar suit where Viacom sued Time Warner for $2.4bn in a cable war between HBO and Viacom's Showtime.

The suit looks likely to go ahead, which is bad business. Lawyers are always bad business. Viacom should take the cash on offer and work out a revenue-sharing deal. It makes perfect sense rather than wasting everyone's time with lawyers, but I guess if you are a lawyer (like Dauman)... then it doesn't seem so much like wasting time.

Schmidt also talked about Facebook (no, they are not in talks to buy it) and said that ultimately the surge in social networks was good for Google (what's not?).

Although what he does want to see is sites like Facebook opened up to search. Facebook recently opened up to an application revolution as I wrote earlier this week, but it is still a closed community for search engines, because the pages are not indexed.

But with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (at the same event) talking about how the search giant was interested in talking with Facebook (but not buying -- because it does not appear Facebook will be selling, I mean, would you?) about potential ties that could change. It makes perfect sense to allow the search firms in -- although it does further extend their reach, but I don't think that is anything to be concerned about. It frees up content and brings more traffic, so everyone should be a winner.

"If they come to us, we'd certainly be open to talking. But I think they're building a great company of their own."

That said, Facebook could still be sold although the price tag will be billions in the plural rather than the $900m Yahoo! was considering last year before those talks unravelled.

There is no doubt that Google would like it, but Microsoft is said to be very interested as well. There could be other buyers -- it is such a powerful property as its membership grows and grows. Since May it has put on 5m users, jumping from 24m to more than 29m. But let’s remember, Murdoch made the smartest of buys for (a mere) $580m he has the 90m strong MySpace.

Published Jul 13 2007, 03:19 PM by Gordon Macmillan

Filed under: Facebook, Google, Myspace, Rupert Murdoch, social media

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