Yep. And that's just what they bought YouTube for.

As Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said last month, no media company wanted to buy YouTube because no media company wanted to be the test case for the inevitable round of copyright lawsuits. Everyone saw what happened to Napster in the 90s, and they knew fighting such a battle could sap their resources, and victory was not guaranteed.

But Google, bless its hubristic heart, was ready to fight. Google stood to lose a lot if an independent YouTube lost copyright cases. But now that the giant owns YouTube, it can throw its full weight behind not only fighting lawsuits, but staving them off with deals.

In other words, Google bought the lawsuits. And that may be its smartest purchase yet.

Google in bid to halt YouTube legal threat [Financial Times]
A Brief Interview with EFF's Fred von Lohmann [John Battelle's Searchblog]

Maybe they wanted the bold-name talent of founder Joe Kraus (also a founder of that dot-com bubble poster child Excite). Maybe Kraus has blackmail on someone in the Google mergers and acquisitions department. Or maybe at Google's level, with $10 billion in cash floating around, the difference between $10 mil and $50 mil isn't worth picking over.

Earlier: Google buys JotSpot [Valleywag]

The Wired News director who will oversee Reddit now that it's owned by Wired parent Condé Nast, already explained Wired's plan for the social bookmark site to Valleywag. Now Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian offers Reddit's take on the news coverage and the site's future.

I asked Reddit's founders how they felt about coverage on the tech blog TechCrunch, who compared Reddit to Digg (a more popular social news site), and where the company expects to go. Below is Alexis's reply, devoid of a Digg mention.

As far as I know, this was the first time we graced the pages of TechCrunch, so we're just happy for the coverage. In fact, I think Michael made some very good points about reddit's fast load time and high content-to-ad ratio. I do wish he'd mentioned our mascot, but oh well.

The team has been pretty much solidified ever since we got personalized mugs, so I believe any expansion in the near future would involve continuing to build out reddit as well as integrate technology with some existing [Condé Nast] web properties, like Style.com and Epicurious.com. We'd also like to continue building new sites — like lipstick.com — both for CN and outside clients.

Oh, and btw, we totally pwn3d [Wired's] Kourosh in Soul Caliber.

Earlier: Behind the deal, volume III: Wired buys Reddit [Valleywag]

As TechCrunch reported and Reddit announced this morning, Condé Nast bought social bookmarking site Reddit. I talked to Wired Digital general manager Kourosh Karimkhany, who will directly oversee Reddit as a Wired property.

Condé Nast first experimented with Reddit by collaborating on a small project, lipstick.com. It's a gossip site built on the same voting and bookmarking system used on Reddit. (The site is still "doing well," says Kourosh, who's not sure what will happen to it now.)

"They were a little bit skeptical of us," says Kourosh of Reddit's four-man team. "But we liked what they were doing," and Condé Nast was "pleasantly surprised" with the outcome.

The two companies started talking seriously this summer, he says. "I went to their Boston pad, we played some video games." And this month they wrapped up the buyout.

Wired Digital plans to expand Reddit, continuing the flagship Reddit.com site while "blowing out new products." He cites one deal with the Washington Post and its Slate site, made before Wired bought Reddit. Condé Nast also wants to integrate Reddit with some of its own titles.

"We want to distribute the Reddit technology widely throughout the net," says Kourosh — meaning Wired wants buyers to license the Reddit system. The company wants Reddit to "just focus on building out," which may involve adding to the current staff of four (all co-founders), who will all move from Boston to San Francisco and work at Wired's office.

Kourosh dodged one question — when I asked (twice) whether Wired had considered the more popular social news site Digg, he would only say, "Reddit was the right choice. We liked Reddit's open attitude. Came down to that."

Sounds like something went on — one could speculate that Wired got turned off by Digg's price or realized founder Kevin Rose wouldn't budge from his own plans for his site (which apparently don't include third-party licensing like Reddit's). When I asked Rose if Condé Nast had approached Digg, he declined to comment, saying his company doesn't respond to rumors.

The irrepressible John Gotts, who bought the Wiki.com domain for $3 million in August (Valleywag profile here), tells me, "This will certainly make Wiki.com more valuable and make more people aware of wikis in general." (He then spent six paragraphs bragging about the success of Wiki.com — which will end up costing just shy of $4 million — and his other properties.)

Ross Mayfield, founder of JotSpot competitor SocialText, congratulated JotSpot on his blog, saying, "It has been great competing with you." Blogger Paul Kedrosky notes to me that Ross only takes three sentences to call this buyout "another great validation" of collaborative wiki services.

So for now, the major impact of the JotSpot buyout is free airtime for its competitors.

While the price is a mystery, one blogger says any price is a great payoff for the founders' $100,000 investment. But after launching its product, the company took $5.2 million in VC funding in 2004.

We're Googlers now [JotSpot blog]