Leave it to Mark Cuban to find more meat on the well-picked bones of the Google-YouTube story. The maverick boss of the Dallas Mavericks has cut-and-pasted to his blog a nitty gritty post-mortem of the deal that originally appeared on something called the Pho List (an insider listserv for new media pundits that you can't get to from here). The post was penned by an anonymous "veteran digital media executive."

The recount purports to tell the inside story of the YouTube-Google talks, in which $500 million of the $1.65 billion stock purchase was supposedly set aside to fend off lawsuits from media companies upset over copyrighted videos appearing on YouTube. This modern-day Deep Throat goes on to claim that, with the promise of future Google equity, YouTube was able to buy legal peace from the major labels before the Big Deal was announced.

But are any of these juicy tidbits true? Don Dodge, erstwhile senior exec at Napster, offers his assessment. Financial blogger Nick Carr starts by pronouncing the post "fantasy," but then takes a closer look at another claim made by the anonymous media exec: that the labels, in striking an equity-sharing deal with YouTube in return for calling a truce, effectively cut off their artists from sharing any of the deal's proceeds. Says Carr: "All I can say is that if I was one of those musicians I'd be asking somebody some questions."