YouTube Removes Comedy Central Clips Due to DMCA

Jeff writes "In March, an earlier Slashdot post asked if iTunes sales of the Daily Show would make it harder to share clips online. Well, apparently with the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition by Google, the answer is now yes. Today, YouTube removed all of its Comedy Central content. Google knew this was coming but you have to wonder if YouTube will be worth that $1.65 billion on Monday. The take down request comes a year after a Wired interview where Daily Show Executive Ben Karlin encouraged viewers to download: 'If people want to take the show in various forms, I'd say go.' Maybe the New York Times Company would have been a better acquisition for Google after all."

So much for that.

[merreborn]

Guess youtube is dead then.

Umm, "due to DMCA"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution"?

Why the DMCA?

[omeomi]

I don't get what this has to do with the DMCA...I mean, I think the DMCA is as much a piece of crap as everyone else, but Comedy Central would still have the right to force YouTube to take the content down even without the DMCA. It's just a copyright law violation. Just because they "passively allowed" it for a time doesn't make it impossible for them to change their mind sometime down the road...

Re:D'oh

[omeomi]

Though really, do 5-minute clips of the show threaten Comedy Central's revenue model, or help it?

Now that YouTube is owned by a company with serious money, they're probably trying to negotiate a deal where Google pays X amount per view or something. They can't do that while they're allowing their content to be downloaded for free. My guess is it's all political maneuvering.

$15/month to watch a single TV show?

[iSeal]

So correct me if I'm wrong, but to download "The Daily Show" via iTunes, it costs $9.99US for up to 16 episodes. So per month, that'll add up to over $10. Maybe something around $15US/month. Now who'se the person that thought charging this much was a good idea?

I mean can you imagine the bill of using iTunes vs. Tivo? Buying the Simpsons... Family Guy... Daily Show... The News... Daily Planet... Let's see... that adds up $75/month. For 5 shows. No wonder people pirate this crap!

You Tube without copyright content is WORTHLESS.

[Archeopteryx]

Virtually every link I have ever followed to there has been some clip of television that was far beyond "fair use". The whole point behind You Tube is like the point behind the original Napster; Free access to proprietary content. Remove the desired content, and it will not matter if it remains free. Charge for it what it costs to pay for rights, and it won't matter that the content is still there.

Google got had.

Re:D'oh

[omeomi]

True, but it's even more valuable to get that free marketing plus a kickback from Google. Google probably saw this coming a mile away...I'd be amazed if their plan for buying YouTube didn't involve some sort of sustainable business model like using ad revenue to pay copyright holders of high-profile content...

In other news..

[iSearch]

Comedy central is asking all viewers to stop watching their channel since well.. nobody does anyways. What idiot in their marketing department said "hey, all these people in our target demographic who don't or might not currently watch us are getting interested in our shows... lets stop that from happening!" Another wonderful example of brick and mortar media looking a gift horse in the mouth. I'm sure Jon Stewart is excited that his total viewership just dropped by 80% ovenight :-/

So it begins....

[miamicanes1990]

I guess this is just the start. So I guess Google paid $1.65M for lonelygirl15 and cats flushing the toilet videos. Outstanding!

Re:Umm, "due to DMCA"?

[nbauman]

Don't you mean "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution"?

He means "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution, and allowed 26-year copyright terms and fair use, until the media companies contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties and started hiring former congressmen and their aides as lobbyists."

For 200 years, American newspapers were copying from other newspapers. (And American inventors were copying steam engines and everything else from Europe.) The main difference now is that the Internet has unleashed corporate lawyers to find them and persecute them.

Doesn't devalue YouTube in the slightest.

[SuperKendall]

Yes it was sort of handy being able to see whole shows on YouTube. And I don't think that will actually change much in the future as people create new accounts, upload content, and it gets removed in an endless cycle where YouTube acts as a short-term cache.

For me and a lot of other people the value of YouTube is really in all the user created videos. What people have not thought about is that whlile a lot of the content is drek, with some editing some of it from various sources could actually produce some compelling video - and YouTube has the rights to everything put on the site.

As long as people keep coming to YouTube the value will hold, and it really will not change because where else are they going to go to find user-created internet video? Not Google Video!

Re:$15/month to watch a single TV show?

[tOaOMiB]

Personally, I don't have cable. At $60/month, it isn't worth it. Everything I watch is on broadcast for free: local sports, news, reruns and what have you.

Everything, that is, except for the two channels I would pay for: Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network. I don't watch a lot of TV. I don't have time to watch a lot of TV. But I'd love to catch the Daily Show for 20 minutes of my life every day. And you're telling me I should shell out $60 to Comcast for 30 minutes per day + lots of crap I don't have time for, instead of $10 to Apple but be limited to what I actually want? (It's only on 4 times a week, so it really is only $10 a month.) I don't think so.

Various comments I have.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also based on some other stuff I read in the other comments.

1. Whatever happened to common sense? Does viewing these clips online really hurt the show? Does it stop people from watching the show when it's on t.v.? Does it really stop people from buying episodes of the show when they wish to have a true copy of it? No. The people who are going to buy it is going to be roughly the same as before. This is simply alienating people from enjoying something that makes them happy.

2. I bet a lot of polisci professors are going to be angry that they cannot get copies of it anymore for their classes. Yes, some polisci professors do use clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, if I'm not mistaken.

3. Bend over America, corporate greed wants more of you.

Re:So much for that.

[justinlee37]

It's only dead if you think that "the little guy" never makes and uploads anything interesting.

While it's more profitable for a large corporation to police copyright violations (so people are forced to get their daily dose of the Stewart on their network, for example), for independent filmmakers, machinima artists, and small-time .com's, having material on YouTube is an asset; it makes people aware of the fact that they're out there, making things. It builds a fanbase, and that's important to them -- unless they're complete marketing n00bs, they won't request for their content to be taken down.

And besides, home videos of cats flushing toilets are pretty funny.

Re:So much for that.

[tftp]

I can't imagine there will be many uploaders if:

1. Their uploads are deleted faster than they can send a link to their friends
2. They can be banned from the site, or even arrested and convicted and imprisoned

Re:So much for that.

[Ksempac]

Previous sites with "crappy homemade videos" were most of the time only updated by their admins. Youtube allowed anyone to upload his own video easily and even add them to their website. Before Youtube if you wanted to make a website with videos (something like askaninja.com) you had to have a lot of bandwidth/disk space...Now you just need to upload the videos in Youtube and put the links in your website. Your site gets the people, Youtube get the bandwidth's costs. About the others sites...Atomfilms isn t for your homemade video, iFilm is nearlly unknown. Between Google Video and Youtube i agree that the difference is smaller. However, IMHO, Google Video's player is loosy compared to Youtube's player : for example if you click by mistake on a part of the video which isn t buffered yet, GV forgets what it buffered before and start buffering from where you clicked...i find this very annoying. Moreover, in Google Video, i often find that the "related" videos are totally unrelated to the one i m watching.

Re:So much for that.

[AmberBlackCat]

My colleagues and I have learned a lesson from Napster, game ROM download sites and the like. That lesson is if there's anything downloadable that you like, then you'd better start downloading like crazy as soon as you find it.

Re:Allow me to be the first to say...

[shmlco]

I know that. What I want to know is how Google "flopped" when YouTube complied with a reasonable request...

Re:So much for that.

[BasilBrush]

You've kind of missed the point of YouTube. The "You" refers to user generated. Look at the most viewed lists and about half of it is user generated stuff. Look at the most subscribed channels and it's nearly all user generated stuff.

I rarely see MTV videos or "BoobTube" type stuff there. But you do. It seems to me what you think YouTube is full of is the things that you search for and/or are subscribed too.

YouTube is at it's best with user generated content. Removing stuff that is just re-runs of what is already on TV may well improve it.

Re:You Tube without copyright content is WORTHLESS

[quokkapox]

Google got had.

I think not. Google's plans for YouTube and are bigger than most people imagine. They now control THE internet video domain name. Nobody went to Google Video, so they changed their strategy. They will undoubtedly negotiate mutually beneficial deals with various copyright owners to host TV content. I for one will happily watch my Colbert Report on YouTube, on demand, legally, in higher def with guaranteed quality, rather than have to hunt down a torrent or wait for somebody to upload some fragment of the show with inconsistent quality and unpredictable keywords. Heck, they can still allow people to upload snippets of the shows as long as they've negotiated ahead of time. So as long as I have Internet access, I don't need cable anymore, and I won't need to download shows illegally.

I think the Google acquisition of YouTube is actually a big win. Think about it -- Google knows you intimately based on your searches, even more so if you have a Google account and gmail. Tie that to your video viewing habits, and Google effortlessly blows away the whole Neilsen rating system. They can provide cheaper bandwidth and hosting than the networks themselves, and they can track everything you watch and every ad you see. And you won't see ads for things you wouldn't want to buy anyway. This represents a potentially huge efficiency/productivity gain for advertisers, and they will pay well for it.

Google has big plans to be a major player in the media industry, whose future is increasingly Internet-based. Don't underestimate them.

Or do you really think they bought YouTube cuz it was "cool" and they had the spare cash? Google isn't stupid. You can believe Page and Brin and Eric Schmidt do some deep thinking about companies they choose to acquire, and what they plan to do with them.

Re:dude seriously...

[Oligonicella]

"A lot of shows wouldn't be so popular if it weren't for downloading or watching them on the internet."

You say that as if it were a fact, instead of just your opinion. I feel they get watched on the net because they are popular to begin with.

"Actors/actresses/musicians/artists/athletes/enter tainers/executives/etc. have no right to be paid millions upon millions for their lack of work in society."

You say that as if it were a fact, instead of the opinion of someone who probably doesn't produce anything worth paying large amounts of money for. Sour grapes, m'thinks.

"That is why we have our rights being stomped out."

You say that as if...

Well, you get the point. You are expressing your opinions only.

P.S.

"Yes they entertain but the priority of entertainment shouldn't be as high as it is."

From someone willing to breach the artist's copyright to access said entertainment. Ironic hypocracy.

Exactly

[MisterSquid]

I know that. What I want to know is how Google "flopped" when YouTube complied with a reasonable request

The reason so many are claiming Google has made a mistake in purchasing YouTube is the presumption that the primary value of YouTube is the illegal distribution of copyrighted content. Many people, and many /.ers, assume user-created content is valueless and cannot be the center of a viable online business model, despite the success of sites that depend on user contributions, /. itself being a prime example.

Google has not misstepped. The only thing that has misstepped is some /.ers' senses that with the end of an easy means to violate copyright using YouTube so ends the commercial value of YouTube as a whole.

Re:Or..

[wateriestfire]

He wasn't talking about google buying Viacom, just one of its services!