Yeah, Ponyarchive went about it in the totally wrong way. You have to accept that no company will accept a site like that. Unless you're the BBC (Well, Top Gear crew) and you do constant shout-outs to finalgear.com which hosts torrents of Top Gear episodes within an hour of airing on the BBC.
Which makes you wonder if ED could host torrents and develop a similar partnership with Hasbro...
Eh, I do not envy Hasbro on this one. What do you do when your half hour toy commercial goes viral? Very viral? One one hand, you get to indoctrinate an unexpected demographic: Young adult males. Which, to be fair, isn't really the target, but these men could be, or may become fathers of small girls. And getting the father to vouch for the girl toy? Awesome. So, Hasbro the toy company has an interest in keeping the brony fathers around.
But Hasbro the licensing company cannot allow any unauthorized copy that they know of of the show to be left online. They have licenses to protect. To the Hub, to Boomerang, to iTunes. If they see it, they have to act. Basic IP law, if I remember right. So what does Hasbro do? It's a tricky situation. By the book, it's easy: Search and destroy. But how will that affect the sale of small plastic ponies?
I think Hasbro so far as played it smart. Attack all you officially see... but don't look too hard. But if Hasbro says no, then the YouTube videos disappear. And that's that. Well, then it becomes a game of cat and mouse like most other shows that are on YouTube, but shouldn't be.
I'd love to see Equestria Daily to land maybe a delayed SD distribution right, but that's really, really wishful thinking. Would be nice, though.