It was a sure bet that many copyright holders were waiting to see if YouTube would be snapped-up by a richer adoptive parent before “pursuing their [copyright] complaints”, and I’m not surprised at how quickly Time Warner have moved.

Companies like Time Warner, who had little chance in seeing anything other than their material taken off YouTube, must have been thrilled at the prospect of Google taking them over. Don’t forget that YouTube doesn’t make any money – yet – but Google make an awful lot of it.

The good new is that Time Warner don’t appear to be going for the “sue them into oblivion” approach:

He [Dick Parsons, Time Warner CEO] took a more emollient stance than some when he said: “We’d like to have our content displayed on these platforms, but on a basis that it respects our rights as the owner of that content.”

It sounds like what they’re looking for is some way of monetising the content they own whenever it appears on YouTube, in much the same way that Universal Music and BMG have recently agreed to.

Either way, the copyright holders see a return – strike a partnership deal, and monetise the content; or, sue for copyright infringement. What the media companies should not lose sight of is that only one of those options will win favour with the fans; those people whose hard-earned cash ultimately keeps these media companies in business.

[tags]Google, YouTube, GooTube, media, copyright, Warner, BMG[/tags]

Confirmed just a few minutes ago at Techcrunch, this will be the news lighting up the blogosphere for the next few hours. More than likely the fact that Google bought You Tube won’t be the big story. The cost of the deal – $1.65 billion – will be the talking point.

As someone who doesn’t have TV I’m somewhat bemused by the popularity of YouTube, and from where I’m sitting that popularity is more a reflection on how bad today’s TV content has become, rather than how good YouTube content actually is. And perhaps that’s the point. If anything, this should serve as wake-up call to the TV networks – this is your real competition; and this is how much it’s being valued at.

YouTube’s 65 employees must be on cloud nine, and Google shareholders must be pretty pleased too – at the time of writing, Google’s share price was up 2% on the news.