... and then after the Donny Deutsch in a speedo joke was told, James_Trickery made a comment and we all laughed because guess what his avatar shows? Like omg, the tumblr-generation is missing out on some really old jokes here.

Overall, the reporting on this was shoddy from the very beginning. Take this for example - reading it there's no indication that the reporter did anything other than read Sterlings open letter. "The company also plans to withdraw" is an interpretation of "we are ready to stop the lawsuit as long as this means we will no longer be under threat from your legal team." and that interpretation turned into headline: "Goldieblox ENDS LAWSUIT" over at AP written USA today article. What's lacking here is both proof that Beastie Boys ever threatened them, and proof the lawsuit Goldieblox filed has been withdrawn.

Small Business Forbes While GoldieBlox’s lawsuit may seem peculiar, attorney Jon Moskin, an intellectual property partner with the law firm Foley & Lardner, says U.S. law permits companies under reasonable threat of litigation to file a pre-emptive suit. “The company may have invested a substantial amount of money in a new product, for example, and be threatened with claims … it puts a cloud over the company’s business plan, and customers may not want to carry a product if they feel it’s infringing,” says Moskin. By filing a suit pre-emptively, he says businesses are able to actively pursue a solution, rather than waiting to get hit with a lawsuit. He says taking pre-emptive action also gives companies the home-court advantage, so to speak, as the defendant is forced to travel to the state in which the suit is filed in. While some of the defendants named, including Island Def Jam, are also based in California, Horovitz is identified in the suit as a resident of New York City. Moskin says GoldieBlox doesn’t have a particularly strong case. While the “fair use” rule allows people to use copyrighted material for the purpose of education, criticism, parody or public dialogue, Moskin says the fact that the GoldieBlox’s version of the song is being used explicitly to help sell a toy set doesn’t help the company’s argument. “If they’d been doing this purely for educational purpose – it would certainly help them,” says Moskin. He says precedents on the books in California suggest that the law will view the Beastie Boys’ side more favorably. However, the company may have already won in its own court of opinion, he says. “The fact that you’re calling me, and that they are getting a lot of publicity from this – they may have made a calculated decision that the cost of the suit [is justified],” says Moskin. GoldieBlox declined to comment for this article.

Well, first - buying youtube views is a dirty little secret that we all know about in advertising and everyone pretends it doesn't happen because ShhhH!! ;) Second, if we're pretending the bought views didn't happen, Mashable did the math on how much this commercial for Goldieblox can have made in their post. Still, GoldieBlox appears to have benefited from using the song without permission. Before the company pulled the first version of the ad, it had racked up 9 million views. While it's hard to say what the value is of such a viral video, a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on ad revenues from the song Gangnam Style (about $1.7 million for 1 billion views) reveals that the figure is around $156,000. Assuming a similar arrangement (with Google getting about half the ad dollars), GoldieBlox should make about $78,000 in ad revenues from the viral ad.