I'm a musician (and ex-hacker), whence I've been following this case with some interest. I take issue with your statement that 'copyright law doesn't work'. It doesn't work precisely because of a^sh%les like Messrs. Hurley and Chen, who each ended up with hundred-million-dollar windfalls (no doubt now being spent on the same types of goods and servces, e.g. cocaine and hookers, that many here seem to accuse musicians and music execs of indulging in), largely off the back of content creators who didn't receive a dime for their efforts.

That is a true injustice when you look at the plight of EMI, which has brought us Coldplay, Pink Floyd, the Beatles (to name only a few), and which is close to going into administration. EMI actually gave back money (however imperfectly) to the people who were responsible for creating the music and associated content -- the artists, the producers, the mixing engineers, the mastering engineers, the graphic artists, etc. Tell me what the fuck has YouTube or Google done for any of these people?

Or if you look at the Spanish music industry, for which recorded music sales in 2010 where one sixth of the level in 2000. Filesharing, YouTube, etc., have effectively wiped that industry off the map. I lived two years in Madrid when I was a teenager (94-96), and I had the pleasure of listening to indigenous rock and indie music like Extremoduro, Ska-P, Seguridad Social. Spanish youths of today won't have that pleasure, thanks to filesharing and companies like YouTube -- to say nothing of the plight of Spanish musicians. Ten years ago, Spanish music accounted for dozens of entries in the Spanish top 50. Now, there are virtually none.

Let's be totally clear: YouTube didn't receive billions of dollars from Google for the cute homemade videos of cats or the like. It received that money for the illegal content it hosted. Granted, they created some value for the consumer in that they gave the user the control of the programming, but the value-creation component is a tiny sliver of the total value: what really happened is a transfer of wealth from content creators to middlemen like YouTube, who did nothing except host a few PHP and Flash scripts on some servers.

Again: copyright law doesn't work because of agents like YouTube continually acting to undermine it for personal enrichment. To the extent that we vigorously pursue persons like this (and I include private filesharers in this category, even though their form of profiteering takes a more subtle 'opportunity cost' form), the law will begin to work. Do you think there would be no theft in Portobello Market if there weren't bobbies on the beat -- simply because everyone acknowledged the law against theft is not 'stupid'?

> They didn't have respect for stupid legislation

To make a claim like that, without any qualification or explanation, is, well, stupid. Copyright law, of some form or other, has existed for some four hundred years -- it takes some chutzpah to write off the whole legal edifice as stupid.

Music videos and music, incidentally, were one of the content types which Hurley et al. passed a blind eye to, and they seem to do it to this day. The lawsuit details efforts by Viacom to have make YouTube (and Google) filter illegal content automatically -- Google and YouTube refused to filter unless this they entered one-sided licensing deals. In other words, they held a gun to their head, in effect saying: either make a deal on our terms, or we're going to pass a blind eye to piracy. I don't care what you say, this is unethical, and I applaud the mainstream media for finally calling this out.

And I hope they screw Hurley et al. to a wall.