John Lindal’s Blog

You Tube

Surfing the web really helps pass the time when I’m sick. This time, I played around with You Tube. Clearly, you can take Napster away from people, but you can’t take people away from Napster. You Tube is just the latest dumping ground for copyright violations (if you’re the RIAA) or platform for freedom of information (if you’re the FSF) or way to take revenge on the music industry (if you hate the RIAA) — take your pick.

You Tube’s primary weakness is that they’re much easier to sue than Napster: You Tube has a centralized server farm storing all the videos, and they know something about who uploaded each one — assuming the uploader gave correct information, of course!

Either Google just bought themselves a ton of lawsuits, or this analysis of how Google is turning evil may be correct.