Truck and Barter

Geeks among you might know that UK's Sky One has been airing the latest Stargate SG-1 episodes months ahead of the US's Sci-Fi Channel.

In fact, last night Sky One aired the Stargate SG-1 series finale.

We have had evidence for some time that the decision to delay airing in the US was not made with a deep understanding of the passion or technical savvy of the Stargate SG-1 fan base. Witness to both: already by today, at least two users have uploaded the series finale onto YouTube, in four or five less-than-ten minute segments, to meet YouTube's 10 minute per clip limit.

That's after the biggest Stargate copyright violator of them all -- who was uploading every single new episode of Stargate SG-1 and backfilling earlier ones -- had his account suspended.

At one point, illegal episodes of Stargate were so easy to find on YouTube, I had assumed that the copyright owner was being extremely progressive and tactful -- understanding that core viewership of these shoddy-quality uploaded versions is extremely likely to purchase the season DVDs in addition to watching the episodes online. Let them have their fun, and 99.5% of regular viewers won't even know about it.

But I was wrong: the copyright holders were worried about the impact of the 0.5%, but they were, apparently indecisive, lethargic, or incompetent.

Can it possibly be worth it financially to stop a couple of hundred, or even a few thousand people from sharing these episodes with one another?

And besides counterinsurgency, what can YouTube reasonably do to stop this insurgent community from taking countermeasures: opening up shell accounts for each episode, uploading the videos while misrepresenting the content in words, and distributing links among a trusted network? A loss of one account means nothing if multiple accounts hold identical content, or if files are retained by several seeders who can repost banned content to new accounts within hours.