Well, it was probably just pocket change for google (I'd imagine) and on top of that, where else you gunna get your videos...? Oh yeah, Google! Yeah they got free stuff, but they also go LOTS of pay stuff too. Cheap, but pay stuff. I'm sure they will make back any losses pretty quickly. *shrugs* Not like I care if they did or not, just saying.

I wonder how long YouTube will last without its copyrighted content to attract viewers?

This is going to be a repeat of the P2P situation. Whenever Napster or one of the other P2P networks tried to go "legit" and filter illegal content, the service lost virtually all its users.

Nice going Google, you just spent $1.6 billion on a dead company!

To the extent that any of these "clips" are some smallish portion of the movie/TV show/etc, does fair use apply? Or does Japan not have any fair use concept? Or am I missing something?

Poor google, seem like they bought a rotten can of copyrights. 30K movies, and thats just japan? Ouch.

There goes my Naruto episodes... gah! ;)

Mark Cuban predicted this.
http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/09/17/the-coming-dramatic-decline-...

I wonder how long it takes before Google removes videos that refer to Hong Kong as separate from China and others that refer to Chinese Democracy?

I think Google can still make this site profitable. Granted, movies and clips will be gone at least for a while, but shows can probably stay there with the ads and all. It depends on how many deals can Google close with content providers.

Remember Google is already in the TV advertisement business.

Then again, this is hardly surprising, is it? If the content is actually copyrighted, what's the big surprise? And I don't think it's totally unfair either (unless it's simple excerpts of movies, etc).

This was in every news site on the face of the Earth, which leaves me wondering... now everytime that someone takes a dump at YouTube, does the whole world have to make it a headline?