If I ran a news website or blog, I'd personally be thrilled if one of my stories were excerpted by GoogleNews. Since Google only provides an excerpt of the story and a link to the host site, you have to go to the host site for the full story. If I'm running a news website, that's more traffic for me (and presumably more advertising dollars or whuffie or whatever)!
When you get right down to it, Google's search engine functions could be more harmful (potentially) to a news site than the GoogleNews service. You can, for example, go to GoogleNews, find an article you want to read, and then instead of clicking through from there, go to Google.com and search for the article title, then click on Cached to access Google's cached copy of it. You can read the content without actually hitting the servers on which it was originally hosted. I can understand why a news service would have a problem with the caching function that goes along with the web search. GoogleNews, on the other hand, doesn't provide a caching option in their search; to see the full article through there, you have to go to the source. Given that it's free advertising, you think they'd be happy. Nonetheless, I'm sure the Belgian court has struck an important blow against...something.
I'm not emo enough to know much about MySpace, but I'll have to join Lou at YouTube Addicts Anonymous (although I prefer video.google.com for their top 100 section). Even though the copyright infringement at YouTube is much more egregious and, in my opinion, clear cut than in the case of GoogleNews, I fail to see what companies gain by pulling all of their clips from YouTube as long as they're just clips.
Take the case of Adult Swim Fix, for example. On AS Fix, Adult Swim offers full-length episodes of a number of its shows to anyone on the Internets for "free" (you have to watch some ads before and during the episode, which you didn't have to in the past, but meh). If YouTube users were posting entire episodes of Adult Swim shows, Adult Swim might get pissed off because you'd be seeing their shows without the advertising on AS Fix. I can't find any full-length episodes of AS shows on YouTube, however, and I'm not sure whether it's because YouTube has removed them at AS's request, or whether people don't want to bother posting episodes when you can just watch them over at AS's site (that's an interesting question in itself). There are plenty of clips of Adult Swim shows at YouTube. It's possible that they just haven't gotten around to asking them to be pulled, but I think they're probably savvy enough to realize that a compilation of Meatwad clips at YouTube isn't going to hurt them, and might even inspire someone to go pick up a couple seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Now take NBC. A while ago, I wanted to see the Lazy Sunday SNL clip that inspired Lazy Monday, Lazy Muncie, Lazy Ramadi, and all of the other Lazy spinoffs on YouTube. When I tried to view it on YouTube, I was informed that it had been pulled at NBC's request. NBC now has it up on their site here. I don't know why, but when I try to view it there, it asks for a network password, and I can't see it. Brilliant job, NBC.
From NBC's own text on the site that's supposed to play the Lazy Sunday video, we read "Now, instead of searching the web for "borrowed" NBC highlights, you can go to the source! We've taken your viral favorites and gathered them into one convenient location. Watch. React. Tell a friend." That "borrowed" is really cutesy, since I'm sure their cease-and-desist letter didn't exactly accuse YouTube of borrowing their content, but it's the rest of the statement that's interesting.
Viral video is a bottom up phenomenon (also, note to NBC, the only people who refer to viral videos as "your viral favorites" are assholes who only read about the concept in Newsweek or the WSJ a few months ago). It's Web 2.0 in action, baby. Somebody records a clip from a TV show, or uses his cell phone camera to record a comedian ending his career, and posts it to the web, and pretty soon the e-mails start going around, and after it gets popular, the Assholes in Suits realize that they've found something popular, and they didn't even have to pay a focus group.
The fact is that NBC needed YouTube to see what a goldmine they had on their hands with that Lazy Sunday video. Hell, it almost convinced me to start watching SNL again. Almost. But then NBC got it all wrong, and decided to bite the hand that fed it. Their mindset is so archaic that I'd be surprised if they're not still pissed about the VCR. They haven't managed to figure out that this "viral" concept they're trying to appropriate is a bottom up concept, not Assholes in Suits picking clips they expect everyone to like.
The contrast between Adult Swim and NBC is interesting because, ultimately, they're all Assholes in Suits. The Adult Swim TV broadcast can't go 5 minutes without trying to sell you something. But they're smarter than the folks at NBC, because they've clearly decided to pick their battles, and use new technologies and new uses of technology to their advantage.
To answer the question posed in the writeup, an all out war against piracy (at least if you include sharing media via p2p and torrent software*) would prove prohibitively expensive and ultimately futile. Eventually, entertainment and news outlets will either forge some kind of compromise (reasonable or not) that will be to their advantage, or will learn to take maximum advantage of what is essentially free advertising for them.
Capitalism is flexible and voracious, the insatiable omnivore of economic theory. It can destroy that which opposes it, but usually eventually consumes it instead, using what could have challenged it to bulk up its own putrid mass. Adult Swim Fix and NBC's "viral favorites" (yeehaw!) provide two examples, more competent and less competent, respectively, of how media will adapt to the "threat" of YouTube et al.
*In further support of my last paragraph, and as many others have already pointed out, the makers of TV shows have already responded to the advent of Tivo and torrents by including more advertising within shows in the form of increased (and more obvious) product placement. (Yes, Hiro, NIssan Versa, Ride-o, buu buu!) They'll adapt. They're the frickin Borg.
In regione caecorum, rex est luscus.
I am correct so rarely that I hardly ever get to say things like this, but, I TOLD YOU SO. "YouTube's success is founded on copyright infringement," and now that YouTube is actually worth money, the copyright owners are going to eat it alive. True, they aren't liable, because they can just obey a DMCA takedown notice. But when those notices start coming 100,000 at a time, YouTube is going to run into serious content problems. People will still go there to see videos of sleeping kittens and the odd video blogger, but say goodbye to those nice John Stewart clips.
