There is theft, and there is theft. Years ago I routinely made spare copies of all my audiocassettes for my car stereo. Later, I did the same with my CDs. Was I a thief? Nonsense! But as you may or may not know, the RIAA fought the introduction of dual tape decks like hell. Know what happened? Cassette sales doubled, and entirely new markets opened up for the manufacturers of blank cassettes, cassette holders, etc. THAT is the marketplace at work.

The only people on YouTube who are genuinely infringing (and hence stealing) are those who rip whole movies using DivX and then post them in their entirety in ten minutes chunks. THAT is wrong, and should be stopped. Watching the favorite three minutes of someone's favorite episode of "Southpark" is not and will not hurt anybody. If the morons at Viacom would stop acting like the RIAA did in the late 70s they could make some serious money on sponsored postings. That they choose not to do this speaks volumes not about their greed, but their fear.

Last but not least, until an algorithm can "see" Homer Simpson in a clip about to be uploaded and "know" (or recognize) that it is Homer Simpson and thus an infringement, .MPEG blob scanning, or whatever, isn't going to work.

That only happens now because, after two decades of trying teens and even small children as adults for capital or other, only slightly less serious offenses, the system has come to see children as miniature adults (ironic, considering child sex crime laws). That this is patent nonsense has not and will not cut through the hysteria and stupidity of modern-day parents who goad corrupt police and prosecutors. I will never forget reading the AP wire story from about three years ago wherein a six-year-old boy who had been "harassing" a girl in his class was arrested by a cop and led away in handcuffs. That cop, the complaining teacher and the administrator in charge should all have immediately lost their jobs. But of course they didn't. And that's the problem.

There was a time, pre-Reagan, when common sense ruled. If an administrator had asked the police to arrest 13-year-old boys for playing grab-ass on the playground the cops would have told him or her to shove it, and rightfully so. They had REAL crimes to deal with. Furthermore, I saw far worse than what was described in this case on a daily basis in my junior high school, and when they caught it the teachers sent the offending parties to detention. If the misbehavior didn't stop, it was suspension. If it still continued, it was expulsion. Very simple. No need for handcuffs, jail time or sex offense registry. Just plain old common sense and on-the-scene discipline.

First, there is NO "cutting edge" technology that can stop copyright infringement on YouTube. Google is blowing smoke. Some Senior Developer colleagues and I have been hashing this out over lunch ever since the lawsuit was announced. My colleagues - both expert code jockies from top schools with years of experience - wracked their brains over it and in the end just shrugged and said "Never happen." Ditto other engineers I know with whom I've discussed this issue. There is no algorithm that can be created that could "see" what is in a clip that is uploaded and "know" it's copyrighted material. Although if Google does come up with that they will have created the first genuinely AI system. No, the only way to catch people who infringe is by the tags they assign to a video, and the title. That's assuming they're dumb enough to label their clips correctly, and right now they are. But neither YouTube nor Google are willing to invest the pure man-power it would take to run key word searches on every possible TV show, sports broadcast, music video, movie clip or commercial out there and delete all the offending videos. And with good reason: It would cost them a fortune. Also, they've already tried it on a limited scale and within 48 hours every single offending clip went right back up.

The other level is the notion that this is even copyright infringement to begin with. I must disagree with didlypop and state that this is nothing more or less than free advertising for every program that has clips running on YouTube. Period. And if posting a 25-year-old commercial for Bubbleyum Bubblegum is an infringement then in my opinion the DMCA should be rescinded, because it is overly broad and a sop to industry. Viacom is out of its mind to argue that it has lost money to clips of its programming posted to YouTube. If anything it has made money, and all Google would have to do to mount a vigorous defense is to demand in the discovery phase that Viacom open its books and show ratings levels for every single TV show both before and AFTER YouTube started up. Promising vaporware just isn't going to cut it.

You just can't let it alone, can you? Just how badly DO you want to suck my cock, hmmm???