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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

> It's YouTube and mega corporations fucking over and taking country the laws.

But it's precisely because YouTube is a megacorp attached to another megacorp that Jim can even upload videos without paying for distribution.

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Is this relevant? The bastards are constantly changing the terms of our interactions with them, while banking billions and destroying the fabric of human life. They can't also complain that we're not "honoring the spirit" of those terms.

Video hosting is expensive, like really expensive. I started a site (scrim.tv) to try and disrupt YouTube for the reasons that are often expressed in posts like these and I'm pretty convinced at this point that YouTube basically breaks even in terms of profit.

Youtube isn't broken out from Google in their quarterlies/annuals, so outsiders can't easily know. I think the common belief is that YouTube the video service operates at some amount of a loss, supported by other parts of Google. This is justified (by Google the business) on the basis of market share, free video test data, ads, etc. This does make it particularly difficult to compete with in isolation, of course...

Every analysis I have ever seen that says that Youtube is losing money relies on paying commercial T1 provider rates for internet traffic, considering that Google is peered directly with pretty much every single ISP on earth, this titanicly overestimates costs.

If you solve a technology problem and ignore the legal one and it hasn't resulted in a profitable enterprise then capitalism should do its job.

Sure, and Time Warner is currently the only (practical) reason I can access the internet, though I can imagine a better way.

Fair use is fair use. It is the law.

YouTube and these other companies should follow the law.

And I support strategies, such as this one, that forces these companies to follow the law.

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