DISQUS

If you didn't see it already, David Simon, Ed Burns, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehand, and another writer, Richard Price wrote a thoughtful editorial together for Time Magazine on their views on the drug war http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,...

Needless to say, I don't think they'll have a pretty easy time getting out of jury duty for the rest of their lives. It's hard to imagine them creating another show like The Wire again; the show covered so many different aspects of life. Perhaps they can team up with Lessig and take on corruption!

Hey Al--If you happen to have an old MiniDV camcorder laying around the house, you could always connect that up and use it from within iChat instead of a dedicated webcam.

I've also had the same sense of being somewhat bothered by the deal. For me, it's not just the issue of YouTube profiting off of illegally uploaded content, it's the lack of any regard for the users who posted their own videos and who built the site. At least competitors like Revver have a revenue sharing model that rewards content creators with a share of the ad revenue.

When I watched YouTube's "A Message from Chad and Steve" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg), I found myself pretty angry. The video is essentially YouTube's founders laughing at their newfound riches. After a while, one of them gets around to remembering to thank the users, the people who actually created the content YouTube profits from, not to mention the people who post the copyrighted material that everyone flocks to the site for.

Now I didn't feel so angry over, say, the MySpace deal, where there's sort of a more abstract sense of ownership in one's profile, but here, it seems like a pretty clear-cut case of YouTube cashing out on the backs of its content creators. When Hollywood does it, we call them heartless, but apparently it's called innovation in the Valley.