This article from CNet describes Eric Shmidt (CEO of Google) as a moron for making an offer to purchase YouTube for $1.65 Billion dollars. The author basis this on the comments of Mark Cuban who said that YouTube had a high risk of getting sued, just like what happened to Napster. Maybe Google is not worried about that? Says Mr. Author:

If there’s litigation in the future, Google’s not sweating. With its fabulously deep pockets, the company knows it has the wherewithal to defend itself against annoyance lawsuits for the next millennium.

If that is the attitude of Google as this author suggests, I would be even more worried for Google. True, they may have the resources to pay damages done from copywrite infringement, but let’s not forget the mistake that Ford made with producing the Pinto. They knew the car was defective (gas tank would explode) but estimated that it would be more expensive to fix the problem than to incur the legal costs. Unfortunately, they only accounted for paying the compensatory damages (money for writing a wrong) which came to be $2.5 million. In addition, the court ruled that Ford would have to pay punitive damages (money to be payed as a punishment) of $3.5 million.

I hope Google has not ignored the possibility of punitive damages.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 and is filed under Whatever, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.