According to a report in the Guardian, the former BBC executive Michael Grade, now the Executive Chairman of Britain’s Independent Television, openly attacked Google-owned YouTube at the recent IBC convention in Amsterdam, for stealing and living off the television content created by the UK’s founding commercial network.

Grade also stated that despite the parasitic nature of the video-sharing site that he did not think that these types of companies represented a major threat to TV broadcasting in general because for the most part, they didn’t create their own content.

“They’re all parasites, they just live off our content is what they do. As long as we can create the content, the content is the keys to the castle for us going forward.”

You have to agree that Grade has a point about YouTube being parasites, but it seems that it’s virtually impossible for the video-sharing site to police and remove all the millions of posts containing content that has a as copyright. I suppose the one piece of good news for ITV is that at least the US network executives still value good, or shall we say marketable, content and compensate the many British writers and producers thus allowing American interpretations to be translated, repackaged and sold to a wider audience.

Still, who was it said that imitation was the highest form of flattery? When will there be any discussion in Norway regarding this matter? Or, are we just so into the discussion about Pirate Bay, sharing music, torrents and so on, that this isn’t a matter at all?