In part three of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, new parent Google confronts the messy issues standing in the way of the video streamer’s long-term viability. As Viacom sues over YouTube users’ unauthorized uploading of intellectual property, Google and YouTube engineers simultaneously build technology that will save the business. Called ContentID, it lets copyright holders remove their work—or, better yet, leave it up and benefit from its monetization.

YouTube also sets viewership goals that are even more wildly audacious than the ones it’s already achieved. First, though, Google has to convince even its own employees that buying the video-sharing service hadn’t been a horrible mistake.

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Part one: YouTube fail

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