Digital Media Summit Notebook

Viacom’s lawsuit this week against Google’s YouTube fed plenty of buzz at iHollywood Forum’s Digital Media Summit, with many attendees calling it a predictable negotiating tactic. "Companies like Viacom are looking at lawsuits as a way to extract certain business terms," said Brian Gruber, founder/CEO of FORA.tv, a sort of YouTube for serious public forum events. But video sharing site Motionbox CMO Douglas Warshaw said Viacom could have a strong case. "If you’re going to call it a shakedown, it’s a legitimate shakedown," he said. Joe Hurd, video sharing site VideoEgg vp, biz dev, theorized that Viacom execs were simply irritated that more people were watching its content on YouTube than on its own corporate Websites. "People are much more likely to watch content if it’s part of a community," he said. At a cocktail reception Tues night, one techie who claimed to know Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said they probably expected to be sued before they bought YouTube—and didn’t care because they want to change the world. "It’s just paper money to them," he said. Must be nice.