Will Gootube loose its edge?

Now that Youtube is in acquisition process by Google for $1.65PHP 97INR 140EUR 2CNY 12 billion, it has made itself a huge milking target by other companies.

About a week ago, nearly 30,000 clips of TV shows, movies and music videos were purged from Youtube after the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers cited copyright infringement. Now, Viacom is asking for all copyrighted materials by Comedy Central to be removed as well so don’t expect any of the shows from “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report” and “South Park” being available on Youtube anytime soon.

As far as I can recall, this is the first Google acquisition that is riddled with tons of liabilities and risks. Expect more purging to come.

Looks like the cleaned up Youtube might suffer the same fate as Google Video. I reckon one day Youtube will also have to do manual reviews of uploaded clips before publishing it.

Will John C. Dvorak’s predictions hold true? That in the long run, this buy-out will only hurt Google and attract more lawsuits — all for a couple billion more page view inventory.