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Quincy Smith comes right out and says it at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. From Eric Savitz blog on Barron’s Online…

Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive, said on a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week that he does not see the Internet as cannibalizing broadcast television. He contends that allowing clips to sit on the Internet actually drives more people to watch shows live or on demand or on their DVRs. His example is a recent YouTube clip of David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton, which was recently one of the most viewed things on the site. Rather than take it down, he says, the company embraced it as driving more viewership of the show.

We agree whole heartedly and Quincy’s point is essential to the business model of our new start up we begin to raise money for in the next few weeks.

Fair use copyright law allows for brief samples of copyrighted works to be used for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. Yesterday, I wrote the talented and smart Larry Lessig to ask him a fair use question and he quickly and kindly wrote me back this morning. The project I am researching involves content analysis of television network news coverage. To briefly summarize his thoughts, Larry felt the scenario I proposed should be protected by fair use but that most of the industry does not. Multi-source journalism benefits the industry and the user.

It would greatly benefit copyright holders to loosen their tight grip on their copyrights. Yahoo’s Jumpcut could allow users to create mashups using a list of copyrighted Top 40 songs that artists have made freely available to Jumpcut users – the artist will greatly benefit from the user-generated and user-distributed content. Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” cut to footage of hurricane Rita’s terrible damage to New Orleans is a perfect example. It’s been two years and I still see Karmagrrrl’s video when I hear the song. And yes, I bought the song. Sampling sells.

Advertising based on attention, like TV advertising, is losing the game. CNN has a constant barrage of ads for DiTech, eHarmony, Cialis, Head On…what does that say about their audience? Broke, lonely, impotent guys with a headache – yikes! Advertising based on intention, like the online ad networks, is based on the user’s specific interests and presents itself in context with the pages s/he is interacting with. By inviting, rather than interrupting the audience, an advertiser has a much better chance of creating a customer – essential in the monetization of video online. Pre-roll is traditional media interruption/attention methods bolted on to a new, intention-focused media environment – YouTube’s recent integration of related videos into their embedded player is a solid step in a positive direction.

Two big events happened last week, The San Francisco Chronicle announced cutting 25% of their newsroom staff (as well as several managers) and Microsoft announced their $6B (yes, that is a “B”) acquisition of Aquantive.

During the late 80’s/early 90’s while working for a company called, believe or not, “Multimedia, Inc.” (they owned several newspapers, tv stations, cable systems and tv programming), I spent a lot of time doing my best Elmer Gantry impression exclaiming, “The Internet is coming, the Internet is coming” – the newspaper industry, for the most part, sat on their hands.

Microsoft is good at playing catch up, but $6 billion for Aquantive? Google’s pioneering ship has sailed and when you look at a pie chart of Google’s overwhelming search/advertising market share it looks a lot like a Pac Man icon closing it’s mouth and winning the game.

Decent synopsis of online reading versus offline reading – see if you can guess who said it:

“So reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being a run of prints where many of the readers will find it completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats.

In fact, the only drawback of the digital form are the things associated with the device, how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior.

Today for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print, but as the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

There are improvements to be made for online reading – I currently have four Firefox windows open and 32 tabs open as I am in heavy research mode – but I do almost all of my reading online. The quote came from Bill Gates and was delivered at the Microsoft’s Strategic Summit – this sounds like something Gates could have said years ago – he said it yesterday.