We're into day three of the 'outrage' about Viacom insisting that Google remove its videos from YouTube. Google says this is an affront to its community, Mark Cuban disagrees. In a big way. Naturally, Cory Doctorow has a different view, and the entire thing has been the top of Techmeme for a few days now.
Back when Google bought YouTube for an astonishing amount of money, the early betting was that they would take some of their cash hoard and strike deals with content providers, allowing them to continue to have IP protected stuff on their site. Looks like that hasn't worked out quite the way Google may have hoped! I was skeptical then, and am skeptical still. If I have a popular TV show, I want people to come to my web site to view clips -- nowhere else. As video search gets better, that's exactly what will happen -- and the value of YouTube will go down.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with protecting creative work. Google can do better than they have here; the bad guy is not Viacom but Google for not doing the right thing w/o being forced.