This week I am attending MediaSummit New York where Philippe Dauman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Viacom Inc was a keynote speaker. During the interview with Ron Grover, BusinessWeek's LA bureau chief, Phillippe shared a funny story with the audience relating to the ongoing lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement of content on YouTube. Philippe's son, Junior, applied for a job and began the interviewing process at two companies - Apple and...Google. The day after his interview at Google, Viacom sent out its takedown notice and Philippe Jr. called his dad to complain "they probably wont hire me" and dad confirmed "they probably wont".


It turns out that the name Philippe Dauman Jr. raised red flags so much so that Eric Schmidt was appraised of the aspiring candidate. It turns out Google acted on the merit of Jr. skills and hired him.

When Philippe (Sr.) then shared with the audience his son's role - Content acquisition - the audience bursts into laughter.

Philippe's reaction to questions about the ongoing litigation suggest he is satisfied from the changes in Youtube's approach to content protection and takes credit for driving this change. He adds "Google is a great company and right now we have this conflict that will be resolved".