Mark Cuban, internet billionaire, blogger and basktball-team owner, is a critic of video-sharing site YouTube. He insisted for a long time that the company had no future because it relied on copyrighted content and was saddled with huge bandwidth and hosting costs. A theory that was proved wrong when Google acquired the company.

Now, Cuban is suggesting that media companies should flood the site with marketing videos that steer users to different websites. He is referring in particular to unauthorised clips of the Oscars which are circulating on the site. Rather than demanding YouTube remove the unauthorised Oscars clips, why not market the official oscars.com site by uploading lots of truncated oscar clips.

Google’s handling of the YouTube copyright question has certainly ruffled a few feathers, not least with the suggestion it would only filter copyrighted content for media companies that make deals. GoogTube defenders' argument that owners of popular YouTube videos should welcome the free marketing, is at the very least self-serving. Surely owners should choose how to market their wares.

In fact, for content owners, the question of how to use YouTube is quite complicated. As Cuban has rightly pointed out, a big part of the company's success is driven by it volunteering to host video for anyone. You can put a clip on YouTube and then take the code it generates and embed that video in your own website. Voila! Your site is ‘video-enabled’ at no cost.

The flip side is that people can watch a video on YouTube, bypassing the original website. If a film-maker’s videos become popular, a lot of the benefits flow straight to YouTube. On top of all that, Google could change the rules any time. As with many new media sites, many points in the YouTube terms of service aren't enforced. The lack of clarity means the company could easily choose to cut down on the volume of video it hosts for other sites.

With this in mind, Cuban’s comments don’t make sense. YouTube could easily invoke terms of service rules and bar guerilla marketing on its service. They could block any posts from the Oscars organisation or just refuse to host any Oscars content. Cuban asserts that YouTube's argument that as hosts they do not have any control over content and no responsibility for copyright breach would prevent them from doing this. But I doubt it.

Even worse, Cuban's proposal is essentially a spam attack - overwhelm and confuse the target to get your message through. Given how much damage spam is doing to the internet, it's extraordinary to hear someone with Cuban's authority and experience advocating this sort of solution. I hope he was joking.

Owners of copyrighted videos should take advantage of Google's ‘generous’ free hosting and distribution, and use it for their own ends, says Cuban. Cuban doesn't care if the service becomes annoying or useless for its intended audience.

Although I agree with much of what Cuban says about the internet copyright wars, I don't think this is the way they're going to be resolved.

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