"Mysterious company" censors unflattering Steve Jobs video

AN OLD VIDEO in which Steve Jobs admits borrowing other people's ideas as part of Apple's success has been pulled off YouTube.

The video was placed on the site by a bloke who is supporting Burst.com's court case against Apple. Burst.com claims that Jobs' Mob nicked its technology and so having its Apple's boss on record as saying this is OK is exactly the sort of thing that Jobs' Mob lawyers do not want to see online.

The video was from a show called "Triumph of the Nerds" and the bloke who presented it is curious to know how and why it was pulled.

While Robert X. Cringely says that the posting of five minutes of the show was probably in breach of copyright, he hadn't complained and neither had the programme maker Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The take down notice came from an outfit called NBD Television, which neither Cringely or Oregon Public Broadcasting had heard of.

He tried to get a comment from NBD Television and it did not reply. Cringely then did a search of other clips from his show on YouTube and came up with 15. All of these related to comments from Jobs saying that Microsoft had no taste, yet for some reason NBD Television did not ask for those clips to be removed.

The full quote was: "Steve Jobs: Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

More here.