Schmidt on Viacom (and other stuff too)

Wired has a an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that's worth a read. In it he discusses the Viacom lawsuit:

Wired: Viacom’s argument is that you’re not working hard enough to keep infringing clips off of YouTube.

Schmidt: Well, if they would look at the law, they’d understand that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there’s a shared responsibility. The law says that the copyright owner monitors -- and then we expeditiously remove -- offending clips. We’ve done that. In fact, YouTube’s traffic has grown since we did. So Viacom’s argument that YouTube is somehow built on stolen content is clearly false.

So why did Google even bother with the legal hassle that YouTube has become?

Schmidt: Because we think it’s fantastic... Video is something that we think is going to be embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google’s perspective, to be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video.

Obviously, we would like to include licensed, copyrighted content -- legally -- and then make money on it. But YouTube itself can pay off -- and this is where the critics get it wrong -- in simple searches. Because, remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we integrate those searches, which we’re working on, it will drive a lot of traffic to both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.