Toxic Assets
Categories: Accounting
See: TARP.
Google bought YouTube. YouTube's primary business was displaying video content from the masses, and a very large part of that content, especially in the early days, was stolen. Google knew it. YouTube knew it. The film and TV studios knew it. Judges knew it. So Google set aside a few hundred million bucks as part of the acquisition, knowing it'd have its pants sued off.
In fact, despite the executive suites at GOOG being a very pants-off kind of place (Google it if you haven't read the salacious stories), Google paid off the studios and actually the music labels as well...and things went along fine for YouTube, as the laws became clearer for what defines content theft. For a while, YouTube was a toxic asset, risking poluting and maybe even killing the mothership...but GOOG's good lawyers prevailed, and the company has done, um...okay since then.
