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."

Allow me to be the first to say...

[camusflage]

DUH.

While Google has a pretty good track record, there have been a few flops. This may prove to be one of them.

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

[icepick72]

... or the start of many more ...

Uhh, no they haven't.

[mcg1969]

I just watched a couple of South Park clips. One was brand-spankin' new, just from tonight, but the other one was quite old---and there are quite a few copies at that. Try it yourself: my search term was "south park" "steve irwin"

Sounds like they have some work left to do, if they're actually serious about doing it.

Re:D'oh

[interiot]

Presumably some consideration would be given to YouTube for the fact that 1) YouTube is paying the bandwidth costs, so comedycentral.com's clip service doesn't have to, and 2) much like radio playing singles from an album, it's free advertising to hook people into being interested in the larger work. Granted, TV shows don't sell for $15 a pop, but the "best 5 minute" clip from each show is still a good advertisement... advertisers typically don't get even 20 seconds of someone's attention to sell their product... having a 5 minute ad show up every couple days on Digg has to be very valuable free marketing.

Who Needs Who? Broadcasters Need Net Users

[twitter]

... you have to wonder if YouTube will be worth that $1.65 billion on Monday.

No I don't, it's Comedy Central that needs YouTube not the other way around. As there's far more cable television access than broadband in the US, I imagine everyone who wants Comedy Central already has it and that's not what actally drives traffic to YouTube. What drives traffic to YouTube is interesting content you can't get anywhere else. The people who are going to YouTube are a demographic that traditional broadcasters are desperate to reach: young, wealthy trendsetters. Those kinds of people are increasingly entertaining themselves and think of the big broadcasters as greedy providers of costly, government censored and advert filled shows. If the big broadcasters want to keep selling to people, they need companies like YouTube. People will still go to YouTube to both post and find first rate entertainment, regardless of what Comedy Central does.

Viacom connection

[cryptoluddite]

Viacom owns Comedy Central. Viacom is ~70% controlled by Sumner Restone. According to sourcewatch Sumner Redstone ' ' endorsed George W. Bush for re-election, saying that "the reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S. companies need. ... 'I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.'" ' '

Now over 1/3 of thesilentpatriot's videos on YouTube have been removed. Looks to me like The Man is trying to keep all this prime satire off the web to help out the 'pubs.

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

[rtb61]

It really has more to do with Google video not wanting to be seen losing against Youtube. A defensive purchase to protect a rather high share price that is not based on revenue but upon the perception of Google being a winner.

For Google to be seen losing in a market against a new competitor would have damaged that perception of being a iwnning competitor i.e. if a new upstart can beat Google in one area, how many other new players are there out in the market place that can beat Google in other areas (forget the microsofties, they have trouble beating them'eww').

Lawyers vs. technology, YouTube vs. another model

[Statecraftsman]

The internet with its vastly improved communications technology is doing two things at least. First, it's making the things people used to do locally under fair use a global threat to the value of the traditional distribution schemes. Secondly, the seriouslness of the threat is causing all those lawyers who thought they were protecting content with their licenses to realize it wasn't their work at all that protected content. It was the difficulty of distribution. So lawyers are being taken to the mat everywhere and they're doing what they can. In this case, I doubt it's going to have much effect. There are other sites and even on YouTube the volume of uploads would overwhelm any number of people they put in charge of looking for copyrighted content. They could moderate all video posts to deal with the traffic but it's all just a sideshow. YouTube isn't competing against another couple of large video sites with similar constraints to them. It's competing against another model...one of thousands of smaller video sites, all indexed, and rated by the community. YouTube's challenge is to demostrate that they are providing value even to those whose copyrighted content they are distributing. The happy medium may be one where best of clips are allowed but no complete works without a subscription. Guess we'll all see how it goes...

Re:So much for that.

[ImaNihilist]

This is what I've been saying for a while now. YouTube is over. 6 months from now all the illegal content will be gone and YouTube might as well just divide the sight into two sections: BoobTube and MTVTube, because that's the only content it's going to have. Thing is, we already have BoobTubes all over the internet, and music videos...eh. You can usually find the video you are looking for from the artists website, and it's not in shitty Flash format. If that fails, it's on MySpace.

I really liked YouTube too. It was nice to be able to watch Comedy Central shows, and older Adult Swim stuff that isn't on Fix. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.

I still don't get why Google bought YouTube. It's just a giant liability. It's like buying the The Pirate Bay. Sure we all love it, but who actually wants to own that?

Re:What happened to "safe harbor"?

[grcumb]

"...as long as google removes any content when requested by the copyright holder, they are safe legally..."

This is the part I don't get. Comedy Central [comedycentral.com] itself links to Daily Show [comedycentral.com] and Colbert Report [comedycentral.com] clips on Youtube. So who, then, issued the DMCA requests, and why didn't they let the webmaster know?

This makes no sense.

Re:So much for that.

[ImaNihilist]

That's because you are in the minority. YouTube has grown beyond the kind of people who read Slashdot, play WoW, and know what a "roflcopter" is. The mainstream YouTube crowd goes there for music videos, comedy central, and other various TV show clips. My ex-girlfriend would watch project runway on YouTube.

Really, there aren't that many people that want to watch some homemade crap. You might think that, but the reality is that's been around forever on various sites, and those sites have been small. The audience just isn't that huge. While it might seem like even a brookers or lonelygirl video has a massive amount of hits, and that's true, that's only one video. For every one of those viral vidoes that gets 100,000 hits in a day, there are 100 clips of copyrighted material that get 5,000 hits.

Just look at the comparison between YouTube and Google Video. The only real difference is that YouTube has copyrighted material, and for that reason YouTube is probably several orders of magnitude more successful.

Overtime you will see YouTube phase out into just another AtomFilms...or iFilm...or Google Video. The only thing that ever made YouTube different was the massive amount of copyrighted material.

Re:Why the DMCA?

[evilviper]

It's not a perfect law, but if all new internet legislation made this much sense I'd feel quite a bit better about the US Congress.

The biggest problem with it, is that it provides little to no punishment for faulty DMCA notices. The onus is on you to argue with your ISP that they really shouldn't have taken-down your website (Google is one of the few companies that don't go overboard at the first DMCA notice and takedown), and the company gets to keep on doing it.

How this got stuck in the same bill as the "you can't decrypt the movies you bought" BS, I have no idea.

It's a dual-use bill. The original intention was really about stopping companies from selling things like satellite descramblers, it just happens that it was vague enough that it outlawed all fair use.

YouTube sold me on both the Daily Show and Colbert

[Morky]

The reason that YouTube is such a good venue for the Daily Show and Colbert is that you can search clips from the shows by subject. You can't do that in iTunes. The other problem with using iTunes for all TV content is that a daily 20-minute show is not worth the same amount of money as an episode of Studio 60 or Battlestar Galactica. Charge 50 cents per episode and iTunes would probably increase its revenue, especially now that YouTube is dead. That is, dead beyond sharing baby videos and promoting Chinese lip-syncers.

I say google bought Youtube to remove competition

[Mex]

Who cares if it makes a profit? They got so far behind them in terms of competition, maybe this was the easiest way...