Cuban called it, and other stories – March 14, 2007

Cuban called it. And so it came to pass that Mark Cuban’s dire warnings about the fate of YouTube seem to be coming true. Cuban has long said that it’s only a matter of time before YouTube gets clobbered by copyright owners, and now of course it’s being sued by Viacom. In his latest post on the topic, Cuban asserts that “Google may not know it, but they have already lost” because “the entertainment industry may not be great at many things, but getting copyright law changed to meet their expecations is one thing they are better than anyone at.”

Slacker promises much, but can it deliver? That seems to be the consensus from the huge amount of coverage of the launch of Slacker today. Right now, it’s a “personalized Internet radio station” similar to Pandora, but it has ambitions to be a whole lot more: a music download service and an iPod killer. It currently has $13.5 m in funding, but as TechCrunch says, “they will probably need a whole lot more to pull this off.” And speaking of Pandora, Sun Microsystems – would you believe – has a great music search and recommendation technology incubating in its labs. Called Search inside the Music, it works by comparing the acoustic qualities of music to group tracks into genres. I’ve seen a demo and it’s pretty cool, but as yet there is no indication of how Sun plans to commercialize it.

Still twittering. Amusing post from twitter-naysayer Kevin Dugan.

Google moving away from net neutrality stance? So says Drew Clark of GigaOm.

Behind the VC curtain. Matt Marshall reports on a new site that invites entrepreneurs to rate VCs. Uh oh.

Technorati Tags: Mark Cuban, YouTube, Google, Slacker, twitter, net neutrality, TheFunded, venture capital