Feeling the anti-corporate love?
I guess the folks at SFGate.com don't mind showing their disdain for corporate America. The notoriously corporate news web site, owned by Hearst Communications Inc., used their culture blog this morning to rip Comedy Central for asking YouTube to remove assorted video clips of popular CC shows.
The culture blog rumbles with the usual "anti-establishment" rhetoric one commonly hears coming from the pierced lips of an aggressively-ticked off juvenile. They try to cite "incredible reach" and free marketing as a reason these clips should remain. But the corporately paid writers at SFGate seem to forget one thing that is posted in big letters on their very own web site. COPYRIGHT
You see kids, there is a little law called copyright infringement that allows your content to be protected from theft. It means I can't take SFGate material and post it right here as mine and make money off it. It seems as though your corporate check-signers seem to understand this with their big copyright page easily accessible on the front page of your site.
So how did it miss your misfit boat? Clearly without corporate dollars from Hearst, the culture blog would not exist. And so you'd be quickly booted to the gutter of the media world while trying to prove your subversive ideas are better than the vastly successful copyright protected ways of corporate America.
You see, I respect Viacom for protecting their content. There is no doubt that YouTube has a tremendous reach. But YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley wouldn't be worth $1.6 billion right now had they posted their video sharing idea on a blog for free while damning the man. Would the culture blog have an once of the traffic they do right now without the power and money of Hearst? Didn't think so!
So Mark Morford, quit blasting the corporate media for protecting their content as you hide behind your own corporate curtain.