Google YouTube

If you are a keen follower of tech news, then you would have seen this all over the place by now:

Google may buy YouTube.

For all the technical and financial discussions about this possibility:

What does this mean to me as a user though? Well for one I can stop worrying about the possibility of YouTube being sued into bankruptcy and eventual site shutdown. Moving my videos to another host and editing *all* of my posts containing YouTube embedded videos would be a huge pain in the ass.

And for those of you who use copyrighted songs and footage in your videos, you can breathe a little easier too. As it stands, YouTube is obliged to remove any videos that may infringe on copyrights IF the videos are brought to their attention first. So basically, someone would have to spot your video and report you to YouTube.

However, this procedure was still not satisfying the big media companies as it means that they would have to police the site themselves. This is nigh on impossible as you can imagine. Which is why they have always been threatening lawsuits against YouTube in an effort to force the responsibility of policing the site back to YouTube. This would cripple and possibly kill YouTube the company in the process.

With Google as the potential owner, and with their experience in battling intellectual property lawsuits, YouTube is guaranteed of survival. A suitable and *workable* compromise between the media companies and YouTube would be reached one way or the other. Whether or not Google can make good revenue out of YouTube remains to be seen.

To us as users, it would mean that we can continue to use the biggest video-sharing site available now without worrying about it going under. I’m excited to see the outcome of these rumours.

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