Weezer understands how to work YouTube: allude to these 24 viral videos

Weezer has been geek rock since before I was logging onto the Internet using Prodigy in fifth grade. And who among us never wondered: what's with these homies, dissing my girl? Point is: the band gets the geeks. So it's no surprise that they understand one of the easiest way to go viral on YouTube and across the Web is to make multiple references to videos gone viral before. Check out the band's latest video above, "Pork and Beans," and then below, embeds of all of the viral videos referenced.

One Man Band

Numa Numa

Dramatic Gopher

How the Dramatic Prairie Dog was Born

Afro Ninja

Diet coke and Mentos experiment

GI Joe Gay

Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time.

Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

Star Wars Kid

Crank That Soldier Boy

Evolution of Dance

"Chocolate Rain" Original Song by Tay Zonday

K-Fed Popozao

Daft Hands - Technologic

Daft Bodies - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Shoes the Full Version

Planet Unicorn

It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!

Will it Blend

(Montage by Nick McGlynn)

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Jack Conte - The Giant

Try the New YouTube Player Beta!

Linking to movies leads to $4 million in fines

Hollywood has been granted another victory in its war against piracy, this time at the expense of two linking sites that the Motion Picture Association of America believes profited from enabling copyright infringement. Both ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net have been hit with multimillion dollar judgments recently for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows.

Even though ShowStash and Cinematube didn't host any of these files, both were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement, according to the judges' opinions, because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows. Aside from monetary damages, both sites are now prohibited from engaging in further activity that would infringe upon the studios' work.

The damages totaled $2.7 million for ShowStash and $1.3 million for Cinematube, neither of which were particularly well-known to the general Internet community. The MPAA doesn't seem to care much that it gives free publicity to these tiny sites when it makes announcements of its litigation plans, however. The organization apparently hopes that others will merely feel threatened by the prospect of paying out millions of dollars and shut down voluntarily.

"Our goal is to stop this kind of blatant and illegal activity," MPAA executive VP John Malcolm said in a statement. "These judgments indicate that the studios will not hesitate to vigorously pursue litigation against this type of site."

The MPAA announced the two judgments just two weeks after the organization was awarded $110 million in damages from TorrentSpy. The MPAA hailed the decision as a clear victory for the movie studios that served as the icing on the cake after TorrentSpy's announcement that it would shut down for good on March 24.

With two more (albeit relatively small) victories under its belt, the MPAA is even more confident in its stance against sites that merely link to potentially copyrighted material. It wouldn't be surprising to see ShowStash and Cinematube eventually mirror TorrentSpy's decision to shut down, too.

It's not uncommon to find illegal movies being hosted on servers outside the US, which is why sites based in the US have not hesitated to merely tell users how to get to them. The increase in lawsuits against sites that point to illegal movies, however, may push more of them to move operations overseas too in order to skirt further litigation.

Further reading:

• If you have PACER access, Cinematube's is case number 2:07-cv-06257-GW-RC and ShowStash's is case number 2:2007cv04510

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Comcast trying to sell 46 outlying cable systems

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Comcast Corp. is trying to sell 46 smaller cable systems serving 400,000 to 500,000 subscribers as it seeks to improve efficiency by shedding disparate operations.

"It's not about money at all," said Robert Serrano, an analyst at SNL Kagan in Monterey, Calif. "They are pruning some of the more outlying areas in order to make a more efficient cluster."

Serrano said Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV operator, could get $3,000 to $4,500 per subscriber, although sale prices would vary by asset.

Most of the cable systems are in eight states — Maine, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, Virginia, Georgia, West Virginia and California, and almost one-fourth of them are in rural central and northern Maine.

The Times Record in Brunswick, Maine, was the first to report that Comcast was selling 46 systems.

John Goran, chairman of the cable TV regulatory board in Freeport, Maine, said Comcast told him about its plans a week ago. Comcast serves 14 towns in Maine and is looking to get out of 11.

In Maine, the most logical buyer for Comcast subsidiaries is Time Warner Cable Inc., which serves 85 percent of Maine, including areas surrounding the 11 municipalities Comcast hopes to bow out of, Goran said. A Time Warner spokesman declined to comment.

Comcast took over the Maine systems after it acquired York, Maine-based Susquehanna Communications in May 2006 for $540 million in cash. It already owned 30 percent of SusCom and valued the entire asset at $775 million.

When a cable system is concentrated geographically, it is cheaper to provide services, Serrano said. If the area also happens to be more affluent, the company gets the added benefit of higher revenue per household.

After selling the nearly four dozen systems, Comcast might buy other cable systems closer to where it already has a substantial presence, said Bruce Leichtman, president of the Leichtman Research Group in Durham, N.H.

Goran hopes his new cable operator will be able to offer digital voice services, something his Freeport home doesn't get from Comcast even though it's close to downtown.

"We don't have Internet phone, no video on demand or any of those advanced services," he said. "We have standard cable and high-definition and premium channels and that's it."

Shares of Comcast fell 58 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $21.62 Friday.

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