YouTubeYouTube has sent TechCrunch, a popular tech blog that covers emerging Web sites, a cease and desist letter. YouTube claims “tortious interference of a business relationship, and in fact, many business relationships,” of committing an “unfair business practice,” and “false advertising.”

TechCrunch recently published a tool that makes it easy to permanently download videos from YouTube. TechCrunch’s tool isn’t particularly original - there are already dozens of ways to download YouTube videos, and the process is trivial. However, TechCrunch presents an appealing target, since it’s a successful commercial blog.

While there does not appear to be anything in YouTube’s terms of service that forbids using tools like this, it sounds like TechCrunch is going to remove the download tool anyway, to make nice with YouTube/Google.

“I have no intention of fighting YouTube on this,” said TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington. “If they want it down, I’ll take it down. I don’t want to be put on a black list with Google PR.”

There are tons of existing sites and services that do this automatically:

If you need a .FLV player, there are a variety of free ones available.