Thursday, November 4, 2010

Priorities: Six months after killing all IT IS HIGH videos (including ones that it had no right to), YouTube takes down terrorist cleric rants

In April, they hit the delete button on our greatest life achievement -- civilization's only true measurment of the elusive John Sterling WinWarble. They did it as soon as the memo arrived from Bud "the Rug" Selig's 15-year-old pool boy. "MLB Copyright infringemet!" they said, uttering the sacred intonation as if it would open a cave to magical treasure in a Spielberg flick.

They had a responsibility. They had a mission:

To protect the American public from ever hearing about John and Suzyn's book club, or the state of hotel food in Detroit.

Now this, from today's Grey Lady:

LONDON — Under pressure from American and British officials, YouTube on Wednesday removed from its site some of the hundreds of videos featuring calls to jihad by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, Yemen-based cleric who has played an increasingly public role in inspiring violence directed at the West.


They pulled some of the videos. Yeesh. They pulled everything we had, even crap they had no right to delete. MLB had spoken. Copyright infringement!

More importantly, though, why the delay in taking down some ranting terrorist nutboner?

Well, it's obvious:

Anwar al-Awlkaki wasn't violating anybody's copyright. He was merely calling for mass murder. No corporation was losing cold cash on that deal. Thus, no pool boys revved up their memo-makers.


If only al-Awlkaki had sprinkled Yankee game analysis into his rants!

YouTube would have had a reason to move.

2 comments:

  1. If you want Youtube to stand up for you, you'll have to write all your blogs in muslin. Or whatever those people talk.
    John

    ReplyDelete
  2. You got this one right, Duque.

    ReplyDelete

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