Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Unclean Hands

Prinny, the swimming cat

The Sun reports on a new iPhone app:

A woman desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to exercise has invented an iPhone app that measures how many calories you burn off having sex.
The 59p download, called the Bedometer, analyses the time and intensity of each romp.

Chuffed Livvy Thompson, 25, said: "The results have been amazing. My boyfriend can't get enough of it."

The gizmo is put on the bed and measures raunchy activity using the iPhone or iPod Touch's motion sensor before adding up the calories.

Do not want.

Lorry push

R.I.P. Alex Chilton

____ Walks Into A Bar

Imagine you are a designer of high-performance automobile engines. You design engines and then sell the designs to automobile manufacturers. You have customers of all sizes: from lone hobbyists and weekend racers to major car companies. You give them the engine design, they give you some cash and that's that - flat fee, regardless of how many engines they actually build and use. As long as they aren't re-selling or giving away your design, and aren't just building and selling completed engines based on your design, everything is cool. In other words, you aren't selling to people who would then use your designs to compete directly with you - you only sell to people who use your engine designs as part of something bigger.

Some of your customers are in the drivetrain business. They design a transmission, drive shaft, axles, wheels and a suspension system to use a modified version of your engine, and then they sell that design to car makers. The car makers build the drivetrain, attach a frame, an interior, headlights, etc.. These drivetrain designers pay you for every unit they sell, and most of your income comes from these companies.

Musical interlude: Gillian Welch, "Everything Is Free":

What a great song! She's a treasure. Now, back to the story.

Imagine one of your drivetrain customers is faced with growing competition from a set of popular free drivetrain designs. As in: you can go to the web and download Bob's Free DriveTrain Design, stuff it into your manufacturing system and out comes a drivetrain (there are also plenty of free engine designs, which have steadily eroded your own share of the engine design market). In response to this, your drivetrain customer is thinking about giving away some of his low-end designs, for free, in hopes of getting some visibility among people who would normally not even think of paying for a drivetrain design, given the abundance of free options. The plan is to give away some low-end designs, and hope they are so pleased with the free stuff that they'll eventually want to upgrade to one of the company's higher-end, non-free, designs. You get no money when someone downloads a free design, but would get your standard payment for an 'upgrade'.

The problem for you: if they were to give away their drivetrain design, they'd also be giving away your engine design (because it's an integral part of their drivetrain design). And that is forbidden by your licensing contract. So, they've offered to buy your entire engine design business, giving them complete ownership of your designs, for roughly two years of what they're currently paying you in royalties. But you declined, because you enjoy designing engines.

The next option seems to be: allow them to give away your design (to whoever wants it, unlimited, "free as in beer"), in exchange for an up-front fee. In effect, you would sell them the right to distribute your designs for free.

What's a reasonable fee ?

Are there any other options ?

NJ Woman Eats Her Way to “World’s Fattest” - News- msnbc.com.

A New Jersey woman has a big fat goal: To eat her way to the title of “World’s Fattest Woman.”

The already 600-pound Donna Simpson of Old Bridge, N.J., has 400 pounds to go and plans to reach the 1,000-pound mark in the next two years, reports the New York Post.

Atta girl! Show the world! Be the fattest woman you can be!

She plans to eat 12,000 calories a day, which is at least 2,000 more calories than Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps consumes during his training. The only difference is he burns 3,000 calories each day during that time.

12,000 calories? OMG.

Could this story possibly get better?

Yes, it can!

But eating that much is expensive -- as much as a $750-a-week budget. So what’s a girl to do? Get men to pay her to eat, of course.

Simpson, 42, who already has a boyfriend (who's only 150 pounds) has found other men that are willing to pay to watch her eat burgers, fries, cakes, chips, and 70-pieces of sushi at a time, on her Web site.

On SupersizedBombshells.com [NSFW], Simpson goes by the name Treasure, and lists some of her hobbies as "eating, going to restaurants, snuggling and being fed."

Oh men. Is there anything we can't fetishize ?

And the thought of eating 70 pieces of sushi at once... gack. I may never eat again.

On the other hand. eating might be safer than jogging on the beach:

The mother of a man hit and killed by a small plane as he jogged on a South Carolina beach says he was on a business trip and looking forward to heading home for his daughter's third birthday.

Authorities in Hilton Head say Robert Gary Jones of Georgia died instantly when the plane hit him as it made an emergency landing. It had lost its propeller and the pilot's vision was blocked by oil on the windshield.

Yipe!

Why audiences hate modern classical music