HNatWORK
I'm going to take an optimistic tack and say they're doing this for the PR benefits of being seen as creating new technology that gives people tools they never thought they could have, somewhat like Microsoft has done with the Kinect.
I let it run a few hours in Python on a fastish laptop (although I could only use one core) and only got to ~23%. I became interested in the number of minutes it took to advance each step, and found an interesting pattern:
To go from 7% to 8% takes 2.719 times as long as 6% to 7%, and 8% to 9% takes 2.719 times as long as that. The period eventually settles at e (2.7182818...). Using this, it should be easy to calculate the total number of minutes as such: I found it took 100210581 minutes to get to 19%, so: 100% = 100210581 * e^(100-19) = 1.509e+43
I checked my math by using another number (36865412 is ~18%) so while I don't understand the underlying mathematics, I'm at least confident that this is correct. It also contradicts my intuition which says that as the ant gets closer to the end, the rubber band stretching goes on mostly behind him and he should be able to make % increases in fewer minutes.
Anyway, here is my python script which never gets past 23% (I'm on minute 14803200000, or year 28,164): https://gist.github.com/1871474
Here's a link where they show the UA for the Google Web Preview crawler: http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4353651....
I believe this crawler renders your pages for the preview snippets you get in search results when you hover over the arrow that appears on the right side of a result.
The previews I've seen would only look that way if javascript was being rendered and allowed to run for ~10-20s by my estimation--based on the progress of an animation that was previewed.
I've had companies take down content after a DMCA notice but never inform me they have done so; there is no requirement for them to do so.
I assume you're referring to the latter meaning though--that they left up infringing content after receiving notice. If they did that then they're in deep. ...As long as the US has jurisdiction to prosecute, which they probably do.
http://www.zone-h.org/archive/ip=174.121.79.144
They have a list showing 26 hosts on that IP that were defaced. Randomly checked four of them (which are fixed now), all WordPress. But then #5 looked like a static HTML site (http://outrightoriginal.com/), so I'm going to go with server compromise, not CMS compromise.
Firefox and IE show the "current" source, which is liable to be replaced as shown by dave1010uk.
Type the following into the Chrome Dev Tools console, then the Firebug console:
testBool = true;
document.write('');
typeof testBool;