How Many Zeros in One Billion?

News today that Viacom is going to sue Google (owners of You Tube) for a billion dollars. Never mind how they came to that nice rounded number. Here is their statement:

"YOUTUBE's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

What Viacom (owners of CBS, MTV, etc) is saying is that ordinary people like you and me are posting content - like Letterman's top 10 list, or some classic MTV moment - and that You Tube is not doing enough to keep us posting their copyrighted material.

Accurate: Posting CBS content is breaking copyright laws. The suits got that right. But once again - they cannot see the forest for the trees: and this is nothing new in the circle of "old media" brass.

I am old enough to remember when the big music companies tried to stop the whole "walk-man" craze of the late 70's and early 80's because ordinary people like me were borrowing their friends records and making "greatest hits" tapes.

Next it was the VCR (what - ordinary people with the power to tape Letterman and watch him tomorrow?).

Most recently Napster. Imagine if instead of fighting Napster, the music companies had invented iTunes.

Nope: While they were busy wasting their investors money on trying to hold on to the past with silly legal lawsuits, Steve Jobs and Apple pioneered the next frontier in music.

I still remember one of the major record label guys dismissing iTunes because of the inferior sound of a compressed file - and the lack of album artwork. He finished by saying "who doesn't love to collect album artwork?"

Apparently - almost everyone.

These are the same guys (different generation) who said railroads would always have a place in transportation because people love the comfort and experience of the train ride.

I can almost imagine a SNL skit in which the skinny caveman who invented the wheel is sued by a group of big, bulky caveman who's job it was to drag things around.

I just hope I can share it with friends on You Tube