Puffy AmiYumi... "Teen Titans." ... an advertisement, or a crime?

Neither, since it is posted at the Cartoon Network site I quite sure it's passed any copyright sniff test you might conceive of. Along with actually being the theme that begins Teen Titans, it's simply one piece of ancillary glitter and glitz that gets generated around any popular show.

Unfortunately it fails to support the points you made in the article.

However, if you want weird, Yumi and Ami went on to have their own show on CN.

Does anyone know if Japan has the same deadly outdated "defend-it-or-lose-it" copyright clause as the US? Because that is the real danger to most media companies from YouTube. The free advertisement is great, but not if you find out down the road that you've eroded your copyright through a failure to "vigorously defend" it.

And most corporations would rather overreact with C&D letters that use their not-inconsiderable lobbying arm to change the law.

It seems copyright holders should have to prove some fiscal harm before they can pursue a copyright violation, especially with broadcast media for which people paid either publicly or privately. Wasn't the original intent of copyright always to prevent others from profiting from a work?

Most 'copyright violations' on YouTube are available nowhere else. Where are legal copies of Craig Ferguson monologues, old college football games, obcure televison ads, etc.? Again nowhere.

With copies of movies or music which are readily available for purchase the copyright violation is obvious, but if a copyright holder released something into the public and it got taken up by the public and reused with no intent to generate profit then I don't see how that is a copyright violation? If you don't want video content copied only release it on a controlled media like DVD.

And if you own a song or movie and then play with it on YouTube, again where is the copyright violation? You have to go to some effort to copy stuff from YouTube.

Once again the bloated media industry is so far behind the curve that they're just upset about missing a potential profit. I wouldn't pay a dime for most things I watch on YouTube.

Andrew hit it on the head. As a decades long fan of Japanese rock and pop myself, the videos being uploaded to You Tube (not by me, btw) are merely fans trying to get more exposure for their favorite material. The fact is that You Tube will open new markets for Japanese music and pop culture items well beyond what generally clueless Japanese suits could hope of doing on their own. Otherwise, there would be no facile access to that material for fans not conversant in Japanese.

Joining any corporation anywhere seems to make people take leave of their senses and cracking down on You Tube is actually going to deny the production companies (not artists, who are paid a relative pittance under the Japanese royalty system) tens or hundreds of millions of dollars they otherwise could earn playing ball with You Tube. Companies should not punish fan behavior. There is nothing sinister about it. They just want to have fun. But Japanese companies are still run by 70 year old oyaji (grandpas) who don't even know how to use email (I am not kidding). This is another symptom of how far behind they are in their thinking in a global marketplace. Shimaguni konjo ja nai desu ka (more of that island mentality, isn't it?).