jmproffitt

20th Century Fox is the latest company to force videos offline over copyright infringement claims on something they officially endorsed. In this case, it involved a mashup contest promotion, where Burger King and 20th Century Fox created a promotion asking people to create their own mashups of Seth MacFarlane's online animated series Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. So that's just what people did... and now at least one has had his account suspended due to copyright infringement claims from... 20th Century Fox. In this case, it was also a guy who had a vast history of using YouTube and all his videos are gone, with YouTube telling him he has no option to have his account reinstated.

I *LOVE* http://techdirt.com/

They have the most insightful and concise analyses on all kinds of stuff happening in the media and IT worlds.

And I delight in stories where old line media companies have divisions that do new things and the old parts of the company work to destroy the new parts -- without even knowing it. Delicious irony.

The fact is that the most dreadful violators of corporate policy — the ones getting that critical file to a supplier using Gmail because the corporate mail won't allow the attachment, the ones using IM to contact a vacationing colleague to find out how to handle a sticky situation, the incorrigible Twitterer who wants to sign up all his colleagues as followers through the work day — are also the most enthusiastic users of technology, the ones most apt to come up with the next out-of-left-field efficiency for the firm.

I've often said that the controlled PC environment as we tend to build it is simply the new mainframe system. The "terminals" are a lot smarter, but we work very hard to dumb them down and take away the unique power each user may be able to bring to the table. PCs become the new weaving machines or assembly line devices for the automatons in the chairs.

Sadly, Microsoft does not provide sufficient tools to allow appropriate levels of end user power and flexibility while still protecting the users against their own bad habits (mostly visiting inappropriate sites that install malware, opening virus-laden attachments and doing things that waste time or put the company at risk of personnel-related lawsuits).

Here's hoping for the day when the "most dreadful violators of corporate policy" can be given machines with far fewer restrictions. After all, we buy them Core 2 Duo processors and all they can do is run Outlook and Word?

Visit http://thisisphotobomb.com/ for more hilarity.