"infringed my copyright" is way too calm and level headed of a charge

You should scream "piracy", "stealing jobs", and since they have a history of ignoring copyright and profiting from it, they need to be arrested, extradited and prosecuted as if they were murderers.

Sky is quoted as saying

There is no authority that an infringement in these circumstances attracts four times the usual licence fee. To the contrary, the usual measure is what the reasonable cost of licensing would have been.

I find this hard to believe. If it's true, then the best course of action for any actor is to just screw the copyrights and use whatever the heck you want. For those copyright owners who catch you, you'd be out no more than if you'd paid them the standard fee up front. And for those who don't catch you, you've gotten a free ride.

Hypothetically, if I ever ran a business that accidentally infringed a copyright, I'd be happy to settle for £1500 (roughly $2350 as of today). Suppose my attorneys cost a meager $250/hour. In less than ten billable attorney hours, I've burned through the cost of the proposed settlement. In those ten hours, my attorneys probably haven't been able to make the problem go away. So now I'm out the amount of the settlement, and I still have to somehow resolve the original claim. I'd think it much better just to cut the check (after a 15-minute conversation with counsel, of course).

I can't see Sky's lawyers taking very long to settle out of court, £1500 is a miserly sum compared to what the lawyers will cost them in the first place! Sky took his copyrighted video and broadcast it to the world et al., everyone could have recorded it and might be watching it back repeatedly at their leisure, removing any chance of Mr Eden ever monetizing it (at least that's what his lawyers should say!).

Interesting note: would this be a single copyright breach, or would it have been breached for every person who 'illegally' received (their terminolgy: stole) it?

IMHO you'd have been better off dragging them to small claims court.

You'd have received a bigger settlement AND it would cost Sky more if they'd bothered sending a representative.

The most galling line in the response from their lawyers is:

"May I also stress that when you are relating this issue to third parties on whatever platform I would consider it unfair if you did not relay the fact that we immediately acknowledged your copyright and sought to bring redress."

The implication being that when discussing being wronged, you must for represent the other party's perspective as well. Is that something we can ask of Sky as well?

Would it not classify as fair use? (I don't mean to defend Sky but I thought using media for the purpose of news was considered fair use).

    Photographs are excluded, however; Cornish, Llewelyn and
    Aplin write that this is "in order to preserve the full
    value of holding a unique visual record of some person
    or event".

I'm not quite sure if this is serious or some sort a stunt to display "their" hypocrisy.

To me, the situation is in the same category as pirating movies from thepiratebay.org - except that those are more expensive to create.

So either they using youtube videos without the creators permission and downloading movies are both okay or not.

Well, corporations are people (egomaniacal and sociopathic, but hey, whos counting) too. So let's cut the Internet off this 'person'.

What? You can't survive if we do that?? Aww shucks, should have thought about that before you pirated somebody's video..