Who the Fuck is Blocking My YouTube?!

Sometimes courts do things that make sense and sometimes courts are just completely free of the real world and logic. It is like a judge has an LSD flashback during a hearing and just loses all sense of what is pragmatic and puts on his legal blinders. Late last week, here in Brazil, YouTube was blocked by one of the biggest telecoms via a court order. The basis for this action was both controversial and legally questionable, but it was also short-sighted and useless.

The story begins with a couple having a little hanky panky on a public beach in Spain. Someone saw them in the throes of lust/ love and caught it on a camera. If this couple had been my wife and me the story would have ended there – my wife and I ending up as the butt of some stranger’s joke with his friends as he showed them pictures of his vacation at the beach. Unfortunately for me and many others, the couple in question had a certain celebrity status and the video of their exploits on the beach ended up on various Web sites including YouTube.

Now, I will not name the couple here. Not because I give a rat’s ass about their privacy (they gave that up when they chose to pursue celebrity status), but because I do not want to give them any ounce more of free press than they have already milked out of this already. (Note: However, I suffer from no delusions that even one person is reading this blog.) Be that as it may, this couple, let’s call them Ms. A and Mr. B, decided to sue YouTube in Brazilian court (they are both Brazilian citizens) to block access to the site as long as the site “allowed” its users to upload and view the racy video.

First, in this day and age, it is absolutely unimaginable that any celebrity – big or small – would be so stupid as to believe that they could have sex on a public beach and not run the risk of not only being seen, but being recorded for all time on Joe Blo’s cell phone. Second, it amazes me that any judge worth his weight in shit would grant a request to block access to a Web page that has broken no law whatsoever.

Let’s take the first point now. Any person who has sex in a public place is asking for trouble. If that person is famous, the chance that someone will notice and record your actions increases exponentially. So any celeb as stupid as that deserves no pity at all. All they deserve is our derision and ridicule for being so fucking stupid about their fucking. Period. End of story.

And now the judge… What a moron. There is no way on Earth that any entity, governmental or not, can possibly enforce the Internet for things that are almost universally illegal like child porn or murder videos. It is simply idiotic to believe that blocking the access of a few honest and blissfully ignorant Web surfers from a wonderful site like YouTube would solve anything at all. But such a judge does indeed exist in our lovely South American country.

Thankfully, this was all put to rest today as access to YouTube was again opened up by a more pragmatic and intelligent judge. But I cannot help but think that this whole episode was nothing more than a low-brow publicity ploy for a couple with waning popularity.

Piece of advice to Ms. A and Mr. B. – next time you want to get busy, do us all a favor and GET A ROOM!