It's not that bizarre to consider this a free speech issue. It does sound like this person was just posting these videos for certain sick people's amusement, and I would agree that society wouldn't be losing anything valuable by shutting this guy's website down. However, imagine if a site was posting videos of police brutality, in order to make people aware of what the police were doing. Even though the site operator didn't take the videos personally, I would still say this would definitely fall right into the primary type of speech that free speech laws are meant to protect -- allowing citizens to criticize their government and mobilize support against government policies. It's easy to imagine that if this "gore site" mentioned in the article gets taken down, then a government could use whatever precedent was set in that case to shut down a site that was posting videos of police brutality, by just claiming that the videos are in bad taste or whatever. So maybe we don't want to give a government the authority to decide what is and isn't in good taste, even if that means allowing some abhorrent sites to exist.

Without all the geek put-downs this would have been an insightful post.

Can you list some of the practical uses you have in mind, which wouldn't be served just as well by an ordinary smart phone?