YouTube By the Quotes: Get Big Fast and Get Out

Anyone who has been around Silicon Valley knows the story behind the story behind the juicy clip transcripts in the just-released files of the Viacom suit against Google over YouTube infringement. YouTube embraced the Valley religion of Get Big Fast, by all means quasi-legal. It did, unlike most startups, get Very Big, knowing that threats of lawsuits were around the corner.

Timing, on these things, is everything.

When small companies start crossing over “Fair Use” lines (and who knew exactly where they might be in video?), it doesn’t make much difference to big media. Only when they get big does it matter, and when that happens in the blink of an eye, chaos reigns.

The Mamet-like lines from the case — YouTube co-founder’s Chad Hurley’s advice to staff to “save your meal money for some lawsuits!” — add spice. The real story here, though, is the ongoing one of rebalancing the economic interests of content creators, large first and then later small, and the distributors of the day, the distributors having won the first decade of the battle. BBC, CBS and the Warner Business Group have now worked out business terms with YouTube; some money moves to the content creators, the pressure of legal resistance diminishes.

Viacom, in the suit, and NBC, both accuse YouTube of foot-dragging, in not thoroughly implementing copyright detection software, as it has promised. Of course, it hasn’t. Similar story on the text side, as news content creators throw ACAP or Attributor and other technologies into the mix. Google listens politely, takes meetings and grows stronger and stronger by the day, more able to withstand assault in court or the courts of public opinion, as the clout and financial wherewithal of the content creation companies, already diminishes, is further threatened.

It’s a strategy, and a good one, so far, for Google. It works. And: it’s just business. You do it if you can get away with it. And so far, $6.5 billion in profits, in 2009, an all-time high in a time of great recession, says that strategy is working.