A challenge to Umair Haque.

I'll bet you cannot demonstrate that YouTube will survive in the long run without access to copyrighted content owned by someone else.

You can use any examples you like to make your case: Napster, Kazaa, ITunes...

UPDATE: Predictably, Umair has not responded. Is he able to respond intelligibly?

Another VC Content Deal Signals Death Knell for Haque-ing.

Report arrive of another VC signing up the creative talent behind the content.

Jon Flint has made a smart move for Polaris. It will not be long before we see more VCs moving into content, esp. content that has created a large, loyal following. I warned Umair months ago that there is a magic number (40,000,000), but he denounced this as silliness from the keyboard of someone who did not understand simple accounting terms...

Oh dear. I'll bet my worldwide top 5 MBA against Umair's reputation that he's crying in his beer over this one. I sense a trend...

Umair Haque's somewhat ironic views on comments.

1) The value's in the conversation.

2) If you can't have a conversation, you can't create much value in the attention economy.

3) Pretending a conversation never happened isn't just kind of infantile, it's actively destroying value.

4) Now, I'm not saying that lunatics should be given free reign to comment. But neither should editors and execs think they have, anymore, totally free reign to dictate how the resources of the firm are used. In many cases, they're much better off thinking of those resources as common resources - in this case, editors are much better off thinking the paper belongs to both readers and writers.

5) The lines between public and private are necessarily blurred in a conversation. It's not rigidly controlled business meetings that takes place in communities, markets, and networks, at the edge. It's raw, sometimes a bit brutal, often full of crap conversations - but from an economic point of view, they're hyperefficient.

6) Not to learn how to leverage this is going to be fatal - you can't fight an economic discontinuity.