Recently the John McCain campaign has had trouble with rights holders issuing DMCA takedown notices to YouTube for bits of songs or newscasts used in McCain advertisements on the service. The McCain campaign wrote a letter to several people at YouTube (and parent company, Google) asking them to please evaluate these claims before taking the notices down. Today, YouTube’s Zahavah Levine responded with a multi-point answer. One of Levine’s points was that the DMCA places the burden of policing these claims on the issuer, the accused, and the courts – not the service provider. One of Levine’s other points was that John McCain probably should have considered this scenario when he voted for bill a decade ago.

Whether or not John McCain (or anyone really) could have foreseen something like YouTube before it was created, or the social impact that the video sharing site would have is a completely other question. I’m of mind that he couldn’t. What really interested me was one little cliché used by Wired.com commenter satanicpuppy, “Hoist upon his own petard.”

How does that hoist?

My first thought was, “With a screenname like satanicpuppy, this guy got very close to the actual quote.” My second thought was, “What the hell is a petard anyway?”

It’s a bomb. Or rather it was. More accurately, it was an explosive device used in the late middle ages by the French to breach doors. The concept is both rather simple and ingenious. And apparently, not the safest. The phrase “hoisted by his own petard” as issued by Shakespeare in Hamlet, and quickly turned into a cliché there after, essentially means “blown up by his own bomb.”

Imagine if the world had YouTube when the French were actually using petards. Now that would be a viral video.