Bye Bye To The Best Of Youtube

Piracy is the issue today. What exactly constitutes piracy? Harvard University offers one definition as: the unauthorized duplication of goods protected by intellectual property law (eg copying software unlawfully).

Anyone who has been around computers any time in the last decade knows that file-sharing sites have been sued out of existence by profit hungry conglomerates and penny conscious superstars. Ordinary people have been frightened out of sharing or copying music and motion pictures by the threat of prosecution which could see them imprisoned or fined into oblivion.

But it is our human nature to share. We offer newly discovered delicacies to our friends whenever and wherever we find them. We share news and information freely with our friends...it is our nature. Why then must we be hounded and intimidated into repressing this natural instinct to share interesting things with each other, by money hungry lawyers and corporate interests?

Huge companies are so jealous of their products that they wish to retain ownership beyond the point of purchase. If you download music from some sites, then their music will only play on one of their players. You cannot take music downloaded from their site and put it onto a disc to play on your stereo, or put onto an mp3 player...unless these players are made by the parent company of the original download site. This is all just greedy bullshit.

Take youtube for example. Youtube was, until recently, a fledgling company with limited resources and nothing in the bank. Millions of people all over the globe posted videos of themselves, their friends, and their favorite clips from movies and television. They posted these with no interest in making money and the companies whose programs were being clipped and posted had little objection to this fast-growing and popular practice...in fact it was viewed as good advertising for their products. But, a few weeks ago, Google, the web's mega-giant of a company, bought youtube for 1.6 billion dollars. The pundits in the cyber-press speculated that youtube would soon find itself inundated by lawsuits and suited lawyers all seeking copyright protection for their hard-done-by media clients.

Why did the media companies wait until Google bought this penniless start-up before threatening suit? Guess.

The reason I am leaving my usual subjects of Politics, Religion, and War aside for today is that I am quite upset. As many of you will know I use videos taken from the web and post them to my blog. This is a common and popular practice among bloggers. But today Google has started pulling thousands of video clips from youtube because of threatened lawsuits. Comedy Central, which produces, among other things, South Park and The Daily Show, has had its' lawyers write to youtube declaring that their client's copyrights are being violated. Poor things.

Youtube no money...no lawsuits. Google gobs of money...salivating lawyers and corporate execs lining up to sue.

So I won't be posting any more videos from The Daily Show it seems...they have all been pulled from circulation. This is a crying shame. The thing that made youtube such a fast-growing and popular web phenomenon is fast being killed by corporate greed. So bye-bye youtube. It was nice knowing you.



But it is all about.......