In the early 2000s Alex had an opensource project written in PHP. I was then learning PHP and used his project to learn how to build a web app end to end: auth, business logic, db interactions, views, etc. I was in my late teens, and using his project as a guide I built several products that people used and were keen to even pay for, learnt lots back then.
This has been done already for years. Regions like Andalucia, Galicia or Extremadura have been enforcing the use of free software, even creating their own Ubuntu based distros.
It's not software piracy what is being targeted here, but movies and music. The software industry can't (or doesn't want to) lobby as hard as the entertainment industry.
I stopped clicking on video responses when I realised that almost all of them were spam videos trying to get some views after the original video went viral.
Youtube Video Response spam was pretty nasty. It did attract some attention for unique spam detection algorithms for video responses as well [0,1].
[0] Fabricio Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida, Chao Zhang, and Keith Ross. 2008. Identifying video spammers in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Adversarial information retrieval on the web (AIRWeb '08), Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 45-52. DOI=10.1145/1451983.1451996 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1451983.1451996
They were abused by spammers, but it was a nice feature, and had a lot of legitimate users as well. Maybe it wasn't used a lot on mainstream youtube, but there were places where people commonly made videos to respond to the arguments made in another video, for example. I don't see the point in getting rid of it.
They suggest people should search for responses to the video instead. Few will and even if you do, you don't have a good chance of finding them necessarily.
If it was responsive, all they would be doing is "hiding or relocating stuff", but the size (in KB) of each page would be the same for mobile and desktop.
That would make it unusable on a mobile. They NEEDED to do different pages for each, and make it much lighter for mobile.
Thanks Alex!