Both Cicarelli and those behind her TV show have good reasons to avoid the blame - YouTube is massively popular in Brazil (and everywhere else), and thousands of Brazilians had launched an e-mail protest against her and demanded a boycott of her program on Brazilian MTV. Increasingly, it seems that the technologically challenged judge was to blame: he ordered Brazilian Internet providers to block access to the YouTube clip, but didn't realize that the ISPs couldn't comply unless they blocked the whole site. YouTube was blocked for about four days by the leading Brazilian ISP.
YouTube's long awaited copyright protection technology should help them to keep certain clips off the site permanently and avoid these issues in the future, but it won't prevent misinformed judges from making poor decisions. I'm also willing to bet that just like the "Lonely Sunday" controversy and the lonelygirl15 saga, the press coverage of this story has dramatically increased YouTube's visibility. Likewise, it's worth asking whether the never-ending stories linking MySpace to pedophilia actually helped to build mainstream awareness of the site. For social networks, there may be no such thing as bad publicity.