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Google acquired the video sharing website last year for $1.65 billion, predicting that video would be the next big thing in internet advertising.

Now Google’s Patrick Walker has revealed that the company is working with content providers to produce 30-second advertisements that will run before content is viewed on YouTube, VNUnet reports.

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The New York Times reported yesterday that Google was unveiling a new service called Sky, which, obviously would be used to search the stars and many galaxies.

Now people can use Sky to gaze at the stars from the comfort of their own home, and learn about constellations and what not. Sounds pretty cool to me, and I kind of wish I was back in 7th grade doing the star project again.

Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

“It’s merely about getting new kinds of information out there for the public,” said Chikai Ohazama, a Google Earth project manager.
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Sky already has layers showing various constellations, a user’s guide to galaxies, the position of planets two months into the future and animations of lunar positions.

A “backyard astronomy” layer highlights stars, galaxies and nebulae that are visible to the naked eye, with binoculars or with small telescopes.

It looks as though the cable conglomerate Viacom is going after Google/YouTube for $1 Billion. Viacom is claiming that Google knowingly violated the copyrights of Viacom’s ‘properties’. Gabriel Ikram from DailyTech writes:

The lawsuit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, in addition to an injunction that will prohibit Google/YouTube from further copyright infringement.

In its statement, Viacom said that “almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.” Viacom would have greatly preferred these page views to have come from its own online video sharing website iFilm, so that it would have been able to receive advertising revenue.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know much about these sort of cases, but it really seems to me that a billion dollars is a hefty price to pay. Granted, there are probably thousands upon thousands of videos on YouTube that are technically owned by Viacom, but how much revenue would Viacom have really gained if all those page hits initially went to iFilm or some other Viacom site? What good does this do for either of the companies? Some one please verse me in the ideas and reasoning for suing.

One of the annoyances of having a blog while still being in college is that it can be hard to keep up with the news and the posting. Since its mid-term time and things have been getting a little hectic and busy around here, I haven’t had that much time to post.

Ars Technica writes:

In the first major mass removal of content in its history, YouTube has removed nearly 30,000 videos after being contacted by a number of Japanese rights-holders, according to the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC). The group says that its members found 29,549 videos on YouTube that contain unauthorized materials taken from Japanese sources, including movies, music videos, and television. Japanese broadcast giant NHK was among those seeking the removal of materials.

A spokesperson JASRAC said that they were also considering petitioning YouTube for a better screening process. Although YouTube is legally obligated to remove infringing material when notified, some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves.

Is this the first major “attack” against copyrighted material on YouTube? Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube may alleviate some of the bandwidth costs, but how will they tackle legislative charges against them? If pressed by Japanese copyright holders, and perhaps other copyright holders, would YouTube implement a better screening process? This is something to keep an eye out for in the future, specifically how YouTube will handle events such as this and others in the future.