• Business Week , Monday, December 4, 2006 11 AM

You might be wondering why Google and YouTube can get away with rapid copyright infringement while other user-generated companies are getting cease-and-desist letters from major media and record companies.

Sure, the money has a lot to do with it, but if you're a network, you simply can't ignore 23.5 million monthly unique visitors. No publicly traded media company can turn down (for example) $100 million, because that kind of money "far exceeds what any single broadcast network can extract from the online world."

This is the Google/YouTube come-on: They want to buy time, but media companies also understand that their copyrights underpin their entire business model. This is why taking the money and hoping YouTube comes up with something mutually beneficial for both only serves to fortify YouTube's and Google's power. Think of it as sleeping with the enemy.

Media companies are up a creek here. They won't be able to go it alone by putting their own content on a Web site, because consumers don't want to have to go to multiple places to watch on-demand video. If not YouTube, then it'll be NewTube. Urgent talks are underway, which is why no one is suing YouTube yet.

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