You must chill. You must chill.

Still around. Just busy.

If you haven't been exposed to the creepy story of Ben the Stalker, AKA "Douche Quadbike" then you've missed a "Chocolate Rain" level internet meme.

Ben "didn't understand" why his girlfriend Loren left him two years ago so he spent nine months making a video to win her back... or something. It's not really clear what he's trying to do with this video other than prove he's a muscular, self-centered moron who is in love with his own ass. And Loren... or something.

Also thrown into the mix- Ben mentions fundraising to fight cancer at the end and that one of the reasons he did this video was to audition for the role of Captain America in the upcoming Hollywood movie.

Here's the video-



A bunch of guys over at Cracked.com got a look at that and realized that Ben was a grade-A psycho and must be dealt with in the time honored web way of dealing with such people- mocked with a Youtube video. Actually several videos.

The best parody video was made by a guy named Sanchez, who wrote a hysterical song about Ben set to images from his own film. What followed were threats by Ben to have him arrested, deported, turned over homeland security or Ben would "take justice into his own hands." Here's the Cracked forum thing detailing the whole sad affair.

Here's a techno remix of Sanchez's original song that's pretty good.



On a serious note I was really, really disturbed by the original link to Ben's video and the thousands of comments in reply which are mostly supportive of his quest to win his ex-girlfriend back. We joke about the fact that Ben is a few eggs short of an omelet, but I don't doubt for a second that there's a restraining order underneath all of this. That so many people take Ben's original video as something sweet is depressing.

One of us died tonight. Somebody knows why. Somebody knows.

#1Animefan loves to use make cute videos mashing pictures of Pokemon or our dogs with music. She's gotten pretty good at it with my favorite being our Chihuahua/ Pekingese Spike to a James Bond "Thunderball" soundtrack.

I recently helped her set up an account on YouTube so she could post and share her Pokemon videos. She has a small circle of like-minded friends online that do the same thing. The videos these guys pass back and forth are about as cute and innocuous as you can find.

A couple of weeks ago I was surprised when I was uploading one of her videos for her and it was immediately spiked by YouTube for music copyright infringement. I was impressed that they had software in place which identified the song that quickly (curse the geek that coded that software to Vic 20 hell.)

I assumed at the time that the music we had on our PC that she used was not legit. I have a ton of music on the thing and not all of of them were purchased through iTunes. Ahem. I've also noticed licensing issues when you rip older CDs to the computer. So the solution would simply be to find a licensed version of the tune she used and redo the video.

Last night she logged on and found that YouTube and pulled the other video she had up, which I'm fairly certain had a licensed tune playing in it. So I looked into this and found she wasn't alone. Thousands of videos have been automatically pulled lately. It looks like the YouTube forums have been temporarily shut down because of the resulting uproar.

Turns out the music in both videos was owned by Warner Brothers who very publicly split with YouTube at the end of the year because they didn't feel they were getting enough revenue off the ads on the site. Google/YouTube then put their wonderful ContentID code into action to strip mine YouTube of any WB artist content. I do mean ANY WB content. Characters in an original skit talking with a WB owned song in the background? Gone. A snippet of less than 10 seconds in your video of a WB owned song? Hasta la vista, baby.

I wonder if Warner Brothers gets the irony of Fox suing them over the distribution rights to their "Watchmen" movie. Probably not since it's only the film consumers that are hurt by that lawsuit with the movie being delayed.

I'm no lawyer but these latter examples seem to fall especially under Fair Use to my untrained eye. It would be difficult to identify any financial damage to the artist and the people who post these videos certainly aren't seeing financial gain. What's really egregious is that there is no opportunity to petition YouTube with that argument, nor a mechanism to ask the artist for permission to use the music.

Since these types of homegrown videos make up the bulk of the videos on YouTube I cannot see how it can survive under these sorts of restrictions on content. Oh well.

We all know people in our lives that like to complain that government stifles creativity and is too restrictive on freedom. I've spent my adult life watching corporations constantly doing things that screw consumers. From where I sit they're the ones that take all the fun out of life.

So you see, the whole thing has been as inevitable as in a nursery rhyme.

It looks like the YouTube party may be over.

Viacom's billion dollar suit will lead to self-censorship at the very least.

Personally I don't see how the quality available via YouTube would cut into any of the business of Viacom. The sound is tinny and the video pretty low quality. If I was Viacom I'd build my own free video model and include advertising instead of suing. But what do I know? I'm just a consumer that finds YouTube pretty damn cool.

Oh well.