I am very amused.

It's hilarious to such playground profanity in use, by such high level execs.

Fact remains, I love Google and I love Viacom (creator of Colbert Report, The Daily Show etc). They need to kiss and make up. Or failing that, they should have their bottoms spanked by the judge. The only winners here are the lawyers.

I think Youtube (Google) has helped Viacom, a lot. I never realised how talented Jon Stewart was until I saw his performance when he was invited on CNN and/or Fox News and gave them a proper dressing-down.

I haven't heard of Grokster (as mentioned in the google link)

So I google it, and got a threatening message, so I've emailed them the following:

Subject: Do not DARE threaten me

I just googled 'grokster' to see what it was and got this from you:

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 78.145.86.141 AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.

Don't think you can't get caught. You are not anonymous.

I have never downloaded any illegal material, but if this is thew

way you treat your customers, then I'm not surprised that people

hold you in such low regard.

I can't wait for the film adaptation of this

although they'd have to get Quentin Tarantino to direct, and somehow shoehorn Samuel L Jackson in to deliver the line "fuck those mother fuckers".

at each others throats

If the lawyers want to live happily ever after, they need to keep the companies at each others throats the whole time so the meter just keeps on ticking.

k-ching....

i love it

made my day.

"you google bastards"

On and on and on...

Two facts:

1) Google is clearly guilty

2) Viacom, (along with every other major out there) are complete twatdangles for not making their content available in a DRM-free (or at least DRM-completely unobtrusive, allowing-your-media-to-work-on-any-device-full-stop) relatively inexpensive and convenient fashion.

One of these is breaking the law, the other isn't. In my opinion, Viacom's actions should be illegal, but in the US they aren't. The copyright and patents system int eh US of A, (and around much of the rest of the world) is bady broken. It's time to overhaul it all for the modern world. A system where by content producers get paid, consumers pay a reasonable amount, (maybe even a flat fee) for as much content as they could want, and copyright is a fixed term, not tied to the life of the creator.

There may well not be a future for large corporate rights holding companies in my utopic vision of intellectual property but...

...nothing of value would be lost.

Spoken, by the way, as someone who earns at least part of his livelihood from producing content.

Stop The Black And White Thinking

Despite all propaganda to the contrary, it's clear by now that most media companies understand that things are moving online, and are working pragmatically on the transition.

The biggest obstacle to a working system right now are actually the rather entrenched belief systems of many people in IT.

They have grown up believing in a "digital revolution" and are unable to let go of that illusion and face the reality of having to adapt their business models to include copyright protection.

But this is they way it always has been with new media technologies: look at the history of the telegraph, radio, TV, etc.;- they all went through an initial period of anarchy and revolutionary rethoric until the dust settled and the old business models re-established themselves in a modified form.

Let's get to work and stop the paranoid scapegoating, shall we?

In support of YouTube video

I have become interested in, and *paid* for tracks by some artists after watching their videos on YouTube. I would buy more, but...

1. YouTube is NOT region specific. This is a GOOD thing. For some of the artists I am interested in right now are barely known in Europe, and if they are their CDs are labelled "Import" and given a price that is four or five times the retail price of the article. FFS, if I could get my head around the squiggly writing, mail order with international shipping would be cheaper. [assuming it makes it past the French border...]

2. I can pay for and download from amazon.fr. But amazon.fr's list is small. For one singer, out of everything she's done, they currently list TWO items, both "currently unavailable". Poor show.

3. I cannot look on amazon.co.uk or amazon.com. Been there, tried that. I get told "I live in the wrong location" so they don't want my money to supply me with an MP3. This is ridiculous as if I EasyJet to a friend in the UK, they'll take my exact same plastic and send me the track, which I can copy on to my MP3 player, fly back, and listen to at home... In France... Geographical restrictions are stupid. And I'm only talking music. It gets a bigger more idiotic nightmare when you consider DVD region coding, the practice of releasing films at different times in different areas or, best yet, different "extras" (or maybe no extras at all) in different areas.

.

So, in a way I am a freetard. I have downloaded a number of tracks from YouTube. If it came to it, I would delete a quarter of them. The remaining 75%? I'd be willing to pay the usual 69-99 centimes per track for each of them. So rather than fuck Google or fuck Viacom or fuck whoeverelse, why don't they (all of them, together) attempt to sort this fucking nonsense out so those of us that "just want the fucking music" at least HAVE the option to purchase it legally?