14 DAY TRIAL // Google Video, the online video sharing service owned by the Mountain View company, is now displaying clips from third-party websites including Metacafe. As you might know, Metacafe was the most powerful rival for YouTube, the video service acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.6 billion. As blogger Ionut Alex reported, "the first video site seems to be Metacafe and the screenshot below illustrates a query that returns only one result: a video from Metacafe. In most of the cases, YouTube videos dominate the search results and that isn't likely to change unless Google limits the number of results for each site, like they do in web search."
The interesting fact concerning the Metacafe clip is that Google Video offers two ways for viewing the clips: clicking on the link and viewing it on the Metacafe page or through an embedded version that is currently hosted by Google. As you can see, even if the clip is powered by Metacafe, the search giant applied the Google Video logo on it.
I'm not quite sure if this is a copyright infringement issue, but the Mountain View company announced this feature in January when Google said that several video sharing services will be indexed by Google Video. In the past, YouTube caused a lot of problems for the parent company Google because the company was sued for copyright infringement.
It all started with Daniela Cicarelli, Ronaldo's ex-wife who sued Google for publishing videos without authorization. The problems continued until Viacom, the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, filed a complaint against Google, accusing it for copyright infringement. However, Viacom first demanded Google to remove no more than 100.000 clips from YouTube and, even if the search giant agreed on it, the MTV owner decided to sue it for copyright infringement and require $1 billion in damages.