Google paid $1.65bil for this?

In the absolutely least surprising news item of the day, Google was sued for $1 billion by Viacom over copyright infringement occurring on recently acquired YouTube. All I can say is...no shit. I love YouTube, but copyright infringement is what it's best at. Sure, YouTube does what it can to remove copyrighted materials, but that is usually done only at the copyright holder's request. Of course lawsuits were coming.

So Google paid $1.65bil for the right to be a party to a whole bunch of lawsuits from big media companies that are eager to fight infringement since we've all been stealing from them for the past decade. It didn't make sense to me at the time, and it still makes no sense. Now, they paid it in stock, so it was no cash off their balance sheet. What it did do was dilute their owners, though admittedly not by all that much.

When companies start spending their stock instead of cash, they are telling me that they think their stock is over-valued. So here's your stock tip of the day, sell Google. Obviously, these lawsuits won't be bringing Google down, but its management seems to be telling us that we're overpaying right now.