For bad-mouthing the women's basketball team at Rutgers with a distinctly ungenerous racial slur, Don Imus is suspended for two weeks from his morning radio show. The comment, though hardly the only off-color remark of his career, was quickly and fervently condemned and even Imus himself swallowed his considerable ego to apologize.

MSNBC, which airs the talk radio program on its channel, offered a veiled threat to drop Imus if he couldn't rethink he attitude problem. But a firing isn't in the plans, just a suspension, despite calls for everything from dismissal to beheading. Despite a number of execs at both NBC and CBS (which airs the radio broadcast) emphatically calling the comment out of line, nobody is going to fire Imus unless the advertisers pull away.

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The Humane Society of the United States filed a lawsuit this week against online retailer Amazon.com to stop the sale of publications and videos on cockfighting and dogfighting. The organization hopes that a federal judge will recognize that selling books and movies about cockfighting encourages people to breed and train roosters and other animals to fight each other.

The injunction is a longshot at best, courts have generally sided with the defendants under freedom of speech protection, so maybe the whole lawsuit is an attempt to raise awareness about a vast social concern that is ripping our nation apart, er, cockfighting! Cockfighting is illegal in 48 states (quick: name two exceptions? Answer at the end of the article) so the Humane Society argues that Amazon is enabling illegal activities by selling the books and videos.

For the record, Amazon says it will not begin to pick and choose what it topics it sells, nor is it really the role of the bookseller to tell its customers what to read or watch. Amazon, furthermore, makes it reputation on selling just about every product under the sun. If the company started banning titles or topics, it would harm Amazon's professional reputation.

Also named in the suit were the magazine publishers and distributors including The Underground Pitbull Breeders Association and StreetHeatDVD.com. The Humane Society regularly investigates and documents organized cockfighting rings that are advertised in the back of the magazines (so they're the ones with the subscription to The Gamecock!) They also, in the pursuit of justice, are keeping an eye out for DVDs of dogfights (one such is called Unleashed if you care.)

The advocacy group initially asked Amazon to volunteer to take down the products from their retail website, and when Amazon ignored the request, initiated a law suit in federal court. The Humane Society is prepared to argue that Amazon willfully makes decisions about which products it will sell on its website, citing instances where products were removed for any number of business reasons.

If the Humane Society is to succeed with the legal action, they must argue that Amazon's actions (selling the products) are not protected under the First Amendment because the events portrayed in the publications are inheritantly illegal and that possession of the products alone is against the law. Given the small number of products in question, it probably doesn't make much of a difference to Amazon anyway. But a victory in court is validation for The Humane Society and that is the real reason they are chasing the injunction.

(Cockfighting is legal in New Mexico and Louisiana. Now you know.)

Wait, you mean YouTube's announcement of plans to share revenue with its users didn't cause even one suspcious reaction? How is it possible that a vague announcement, scant of any details whatsoever, by YouTube's founder Chad Hurley, was only met by cheers. Sure, it makes sense that the comment itself, made at the World Economic Forum last weekend, would spread through news blogs like a roaring fire. There are a lot of YouTube users out there (20 million visitors to the site each month, by NetRatings estimate.)

It's not surprising that YouTube has not actually announced any details of the revenue sharing plan. The issues for the company must be enormously complex. Consider that every 24 hours, some 60,000 videos are uploaded to the site. Even accounting for the amount of material among those videos that is in violation of copyright and should be removed, there are still a lot of people among whom to split revenue.

It gives the company, it is owned by Google, some options though. They could reward the most viewed videos with a bigger chunk of the revenue. (In fact, that is exactly what Hurley implied with his comment that they want to "foster creativity.") But they may just take the other option, that is just divide the available pot evenly by eligible users. It's not as far fetched as it sounds because the truth is that the company has already promised a huge portion of its revenue base to cover copyright material.

So setting aside its operating costs, the company pays itself first and no one would argue otherwise, then there is the company's August 2006 promise to put every music video ever created on its site at no cost to viewers. YouTube first signed a deal with Warner Music that allows YouTube to host Warner's music video collection. How is YouTube paying for it? Through revenue sharing with Warner. And Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment followed with deals last fall.

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