What will Apple Do ?

Interesting take on the YouTube/Google deal and how it may affect Apple's iTunes, from Mask Cuban.

"While it used to be ITMS was the path of least resistance to legal music downloads in the past. That position is quickly being replaced by Youtube. As i have written earlier, its just too easy to convert the music videos that Youtube downloads to my computer over to Ipod format. ITMS has lost business from me. I believe they are losing business across the board. While some people think that its too much hassle for most people to do the conversion, that problem is disappearing quickly. A cottage industry of software apps is being built around Youtube. Its getting easier by the minute to download music to your IPod ...

Its different on the video hosting sites like Youtube, Grouper, etc. The owners of the sites all make the point as loudly as they can that everything they do is legal. Then Youtube is bought by Google AND they do deals with the music labels . So everything and anything that happens on Youtube must be legal. So forget going to ITMS for music. Lets go to Youtube. Its perfectly ok to convert the music Youtube downloads to me over to my IPod (of course if youtube and google truly were legal in their videohosting, there never would have been a reason to do a deal with these music companies at all, would there ?"

What will Apple Do ? - Blog Maverick