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Schmidt Calls Viacom’s $1B Lawsuit “Just A Mistake”

Google’s Eric Schmidt: Viacom’s lawsuit is ‘just a mistake’ from News.com reports that when Walt Mossberg questioned Eric Schmidt about Viacom suing YouTube for $1 billion earlier this, year, Google’s CEO responded that “it was probably just a mistake.”

Of course, Mr. Mossberg was not satisfied with that answer. He then probed Mr. Schmidt on intellectual property, which Mr. Schmidt replied, “Had they simply waited, the tools would have been available.” Again, Mossberg was not satisfied and then probed Schmidt with another question, asking why should have they waited on the lawsuit when “from a legal perspective, we met the terms of the law.”

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Copyright infringement Eric Schmidt Google Intellectual property Lawsuit Viacom Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. Walt Mossberg YouTube
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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

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