There’s a decent chance that you’ve already heard the news (unless of course I’m your first news stop of the day, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about!) about Google buying YouTube for $1.6 billion.

I came across this great little collection of notable bloggers’ posts on the topic.  What strikes me is that so many people who get technology still seem hung up on the whole copyright lawsuit thing.  Clearly more of them need to read posts like the one I wrote back on September 18.  I’m not exactly in a position to say “I told you so!” because I didn’t explicitly predict a Google acquisition, although it is certainly along the lines of what I was alluding to when I said it was the most significant portion of their press release.

I’ll restate what I said then in light of the “in the dark” comments of bloggers like Mark Cuban and Jupiter Analyst Joseph Laszlo (who, by the way, even strikes a kinship with his fellow naysayer Cuban in this post): copyright infringement will not be an issue.  Read my lips.  Copyright infrigement will NOT be an issue.  If it was, do you think the major record labels would be standing in line to sign up for the new YouTube copyright screening revenue generator service? 

Copyright owners are drooling over an opportunity to instantly monetize a massive consumer audience without the costs, both monetary and relationship-wise, of suing every 14 year old who posts a homemade karaoke video on YouTube done to the new Justin Timberlake song.

And that’s exactly what Google gets out of this deal.  Of course the boys have to say things like “we have found some opportunities to leverage Google technology in the YouTube offering.”  But at the end of the day, this is a stock-for-stock deal that leaves YouTube operating independently as its own company in its own office.  This is Google building its media monetization empire, not cramming its intelligent search-based ad network into another online property. 

Google is not buying an audience.  Google is buying innovative technology that can identify copyrighted audio and video content within a user-created amateur video, calculate the royalties owed to the copyright owner based on ad revenue generated from the video’s traffic on YouTube, and deliver payment to the copyright owner with full back office reporting.  Google is buying a business, and they’re buying it with Google stock.

Joseph Laszlo asks, “Will Yahoo follow suit?”  I say good luck to Yahoo.