Yeah, some commentors get overly alarmist with things like these. Obviously the chances of someone going to prison for watching a Youtube video are pretty much zero.
Same with Youtube being banned as a whole. The truth is, the driving forces behind these laws, (ie. parts of the entertainment industry) don't actually want services like Youtube etc. banned - they just want to press out more money from them. They don't want them banned because they actually profit from them, and they know it. But they're greedy and want to profit more.
For example, puplishers of newspapers have been pressing for a law here that would mean a page like Google News has to pay the publishers for posting the titles and snippets of their online articles, since it's their creative work. Which obviously sounds like a major facepalm. Every fool can see that the publishers profit from sites like Google News because they get thousands of hits directed from them. Why would they want to have it banned? Answer: they don't. They just want to milk them (basically, they're asking to get payed for the free advertising that Google News does for them. Ingenious plan, isn't it?)
I'm really hoping that Google just says "Screw you", and pulls the links to all publishers that complain. At the moment, the puplishers seem to gamble that Google doesn't want to risk a confrontation and just pays up. But if Google doesn't and just removed their pages from the index - believe me, they would be crawling back within days (a similar thing happened in Belgium already).
And if Youtube decided to pull the plug on its japanese service tomorrow you can expect a LOT of back-peddeling and "We didn't mean it THAT way!".
Laws like these are all launched by an industry that has completely missed out on the digital revolution, and that is now desperately trying to get a share back of it from those companies that actually adapted to the new means of communication. They don't want to trample down the cake - they're trying to get a bigger share of it for themselves by the force of law.
You're so right. Great post.
