Is it Doomsday – or will marketers save the world?

Mark Cuban has long maintained that one day soon YouTube will be sued to kingdom come by the big content owners. Despite its recent deals with Warner, CBS, Universal and Sony and its acquisition by those ‘morons’ at Google, he is still standing by his opinion. Three days after the annoucement, he is still dreaming up new doomsday scenarios of how exactly YouTube’s demise will come about. Today, he posits the interesting theory that content owners will have to shut YouTube down because otherwise it will open the floodgates for a myriad of other YT wannabes (with whom they don’t have agreements) to flout copyright with abandon. And what they will do, says Cuban, is go after the small guys first in order to establish a legal precedent and then come a-calling for YouTube – either by lawsuit or draconian licensing agreements.

Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, on the other hand, takes a far more kindly view of human nature – and copyright owners. In a blog entitled “Why copyright violations don’t matter,” Foremski suggests that copyright owners have more to gain from allowing users to perform mashups with their content: “users who upload copyright content from TV are engaging in the large-scale, free viral marketing for this content.”

He goes on to assert that “If you can get marketers running the show instead of lawyers and accountants, the world looks incredibly different.” Bravo!

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Mark Cuban, copyright