One of the first calls I got when I became the CEO was Eric [Schmidt]. I am not about lawsuits, I like doing deals. We have had no problems in conversations with Yahoo, MSN and others. I don’t think it is a big mystery: it is about making users happy, but also about rewarding the content creators. I told Eric: We can’t do a deal, because they wanted it only on their terms. I asked him to take our content down.

More Google: They have 5,000 engineers who have developed their great search…they don’t share that with Yahoo and others. We have 5,000 content creators…we want to pay them.

The DMCA argument: The DMCA was not intended to cover any media company that has knowledge of the copyright violations. It is more efficient for them to screen their content than for us to do it. We have dozens of lawyers and costing us hundreds of thousand of dollars to do it every month. We feel the only onus is on us and it should also be on them.
We would eventually love to be on YouTube. They thought nobody would go after them because they were a cool company...the “cool defense.”

Do you need YouTube?: Consumers will find great content wherever it is: they will find on our sites and all our distribution partners. We have plenty of places to go and consumers will gravitate towards premium content.
—Television is the ultimate prize for user-generated content…no greater thrill than actually having your video on television.

Joost: What we like about it is it is a true international platform. We have the opportunity to offer library content all over the world through them. We have trouble getting distribution in some countries through traditional channel.