What Not to Do with YouTube

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If there’s an unquestionable moral lesson for our era, it’s this: Don’t film yourself committing crimes and post them on YouTube. Los Angeles resident Cyrus Yazdani did just that, and yesterday, he learned that he will have more than three years to think about how colossally stupid that was.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Yazdani spent some of his time hitting the books at San Jose State University. But his heart clearly wasn’t in it. His true love lay in covering the greater Los Angeles area with an astonishing number of graffiti tags, splashing his handle, “Buket,” on bridges and buses all around town.

Yazdani got such a kick out of putting one over on the stiffs who run various law enforcement agencies that he and a friend filmed a clip of him bragging about his tags and even clambering down the side of a Hollywood freeway overpass and emblazoning it with his signature moves. To wit:

It must have sounded like a great idea at the time. But here’s the thing about YouTube: Anyone can watch it, including police officers. And once they figured out who Yazdani was, they promptly grabbed him in May and got to work. Yazdani had already served one 10-month sentence for a whopping 32 felony counts of vandalism, and was currently in probation. This time, the justice system really threw the book at him. Yesterday, a judge sentenced Yazdani to three years and eight months in prison.

Yazdani’s YouTube clip made him a cult hero in the worlds of hip hop and graffiti artists, partly due to his brazen ways, but also to his sheer profligacy. “Sheriff’s officials said they had evidence that Yazdani had marked hundreds of freeway overpasses, concrete walls and transit buses across the state and southern Nevada,” the Times reports. As he faces three hots and a cot courtesy of the state of California, what seemed like a brilliant prank must now surely be seen for what it is: yet another stupid thing to do with YouTube. [ source : http://www.thebigmoney.com ]