Pity wretched Chet Kanojia and his martyred Aereo, a hapless victim of an out-of-touch Supreme Court that seems to think property rights and "honesty" are more important than digital progress. Here the justices were, face to face with a heroic innovator, a modern-day Robin Hood, and what do they do? Beat him down, that's what. He believes that because the broadcast signal travels over public airwaves, we have the right as individual citizens to harvest them, exactly as we have the right as taxpayers to stop trucks traveling over public highways and hijack their contents. Up until this week, federal …

YouTube isn't just bad entertainment and good entertainment and kittens and collapsing skateboard ramps and cell phone footage of police brutality. And it certainly isn't just an advertising medium. It is also the world's largest repository of video utility: tutorials, reviews, hacks, testing and so on. Which is why it is stupid for consumer marketers to treat YouTube as online TV. I've been trying to explain this for a long time, but now I can prove it.

It's a song I've been singing for decades: the cult of originality trumping the advertiser's need to sell things to actual consumers who are not awards jurors. I've gone so far as to assert that -- if it helps the client's business -- there's nothing all that heinous about stealing an idea or two, so long as there is no overlap of category or geography. Thanks to social media, I have sadly witnessed the other hand: a case of outright plagiarism passed along its Twitter feed by Ogilvy & Mather.

A combined Comcast and Time Warner, hitherto mere CRM bad boys who overcharged for inferior service, would now control one-third of the Internet in this country -- one-third of the information, one-third of the economy, and one-third of the culture -- and have their financial way with us all the while. Our nation's most strategic infrastructure asset in these rapacious hands? Why not just turn our domestic airspace over to Jeff Bezos for his drones? Or store the gold at Fort Trump? As history tragically records, there is a misleading banality to the most dangerous actors.

What you are reading is sponsored content, because this is an advertising-supported publication. If you were to put a little yellow label above this piece that says "Sponsored Content" you would be conveying exactly zero information. But what if this were not a column but an advertorial -- so-called native advertising? Putting that label above it would convey... zero information because, once again, all the material contained herein is sponsored. Only the illusion of disclosure would have taken place. Which is why publishers have alighted on "Sponsored Content" and the equally unilluminating "From around the web" as the terminology for …