Not EVERYTHING needs to be handled Wikileaks-style.

Where’s a fucking hacker when you need one? It’s this kind of garbage that needs to be pilfered and leaked! Come On!

I have also not found conclusive evidence that he has NOT murdered infants and played a grisly form of ‘dollhouse’ with their mutilated corpses. I’m not saying he did, but there is a lack of evidence saying he didn’t.

(Yes, yes, null hypothesis, if you’re going to argue that my reasoning is flawed, you are missing the point, and your sarcasm meter might be broken.)

This is of course predicated on UMG telling the truth here–which might come down to arguing over the meaning of individual words in the contract and would likely go to court for a judge to tell UMG and Google which one of them was going to their room to think about what they’ve done and which one gets a cookie before naptime.

Edit: Need more coffee. I realized that I basically rephrased your last point. Please direct all likes about my comment to Ted Brennan’s comment above. :D

Which makes the restraining order doubly invalid or something. Fuck knows what passes for logic in their lawyers’ heads these days. They all totally lost it about a decade ago when they decided their new revenue stream would be suing the shit out of their customers and innocent grandmas based on faulty IP-based targeting.

Then if all these videos mysteriously disappear a few days later, we’ll know for sure.

I think I pretty clearly identified my assumption as just that. No “[citation needed]“.

Taking a quote out of context when the original is right above it for all to see is a pretty lame debate tactic.

The questions really dealing with Google are:
 1. Did they have this sort of agreement with UMG? 
2. Do they have this sort of agreement with anyone else?
3. Is this Monopolistic cartel like behavior in an anti-trust sense?
4. Is this in tune with Google’s terms of service? 
5. To what extent is Google then acting as an editor vs just responding to a DMCA? (It is my understanding that Editorial decisions make them responsible for everything on the site in a way that just hosting content does not.)

I think this situation might be far more complex than these are my toys and I can just do what I want sort of paradigm. As a consumer within a market these regulations matter to me.

Or worse, you don’t get that email and you find yourself with a $60k bill at the end of the month. 

This was the primary reason streaming video was a near total failure on the internet before Youtube arrived.  Hosting costs killed anything that got even remotely popular. 

[citation needed]

It also doesn’t seem unusual that YouTube would have an agreement with Universal that allowed Universal to have major input about what goes on the site. This happens all the time in business. Company A does a lot of business with Company B. If company A does some stuff that really pisses off Company B, and company B complains about it, Company A may find it’s in their best interest to listen to Company B and adjust their actions as necessary.

YouTube is a site that serves the public good by providing entertainment. They have decided that they can better serve the public by taking down the video in question. And they may be right, if you are defining the public as a big old population of people who like to watch mindless crap on YouTube.

I do not know enough about the relationship between Google and YouTube, or the nature of Google’s safe harbor status, to comment on that aspect of this story. Is there a primer on those relationships somewheres?

From where I sit, while I agree it’s unfortunate that YouTube has taken the video down, and I think that DMCA et al need to be continually monitored and challenged, I don’t see why people think that YouTube should operate like a public access tv channel that is expected to show whatever is submitted.