Mashable covers the story here and comes to the conclusion that mark’s personal feelings are driving magnolia’s decision to go after youtube users.

Two things come to mind – who cares if its personal? Mark’s business has the right to do what they are doing and they are doing it.

I’ve had the chance to meet Mark and he’s one shrewd cookie – too bad Martin wasn’t able to sell then encoding.com (later known as loudeye recently sold in parts to Nokia and Muze) way back when. We were close but then mark had to go and sell broadcast.com to yahoo. bastard

Personally my bet is that Mark’s doing it to either prove or disprove the legal standing the gootube is using to avoid content licensing deals with content owners. And as a content owner, Mark’s right.

The bigger question to me is why didn’t Mark follow his own advice and flood gootube with promo videos for magnolia’s content like he explains here.