YouTube Restores Comedy Central Clips

ColinPL writes, "Though YouTube has removed Comedy Central clips, their corporate parent Viacom has confirmed that it wants to find some way to keep the clips available. Viacom has apparently given the green light for YouTube to put the material back up." Update: 11/02 20:49 GMT by Z : We received an email from DB Ferguson at the No Fact zone, letting us know things are a little more muddled than we might otherwise prefer. "This letter contains a link to Jeff's Idealog post where he had evidence that even more clips are disappearing, and I have copies of two Cease and Desist letters that were sent yesterday night from YouTube. The purge continues, despite the news reports that it has stopped or that videos are being put back in."

A good start...

[grub]

Comedy Central's clips are a start. A more serious matter is the misuse of the DMCA in efforts to stifle criticism.

An offshoot of the Scientology cult known as The Landmark Forum is using the DMCA against YouTube, Google and The Internet Archive because of a scathing French documentary about Landmark being shared on those sites. It aired in France to 1.5 million people, a month later Landmark pulled out of France. Story at the EFF's site [eff.org] and other news sources.

The video with English subtitles is available via BitTorrent at PirateBay [thepiratebay.org], search eMule for "Inside Landmark Forum" or view it online at DailyMotion [dailymotion.com].

Colbert Report

[AKAImBatman]

If this video from Stephen Colbert [youtube.com] is any indication, then Comedy Central may have felt different about the clips than Viacom did. Based on my observations of the situation, the YouTube clips were generating a lot of free advertisement for Comedy Central. Especailly some of their news commentary, which is quite good despite the humor. For myself, I had no inkling of Comedy Central's news commentary until I bumped across Jon Stewart's commentary on Internet Tubes [youtube.com]. Their followup with Senator McCain [youtube.com] was brilliant, and John Hodgman's analysis was an example of razor sharp wit. (And hey, you've got to love the, "I'm a PC" [youtube.com] bit.)

Had it not been for YouTube, I never would have found out about Comedy Central. I'd start tuning in, but I've disconnected my cable. Yet I recently noticed that Jon Stewart's show is up on iTunes. Hmmm..... ;)

I think the ArsTechnica report is wrong

[reifman]

There was another bigger purge last night: 78% of Daily Show Clips Missing from YouTube [idealog.us] I wrote a script to analyze this ... Of 897 Daily Show videos on YouTube sampled, 699 were missing or broken. That's nearly 78% of Daily Show videos now taken down for alleged copyright infringement without any regard for fair use from what I can tell. More commentary on the week's events here: Truthiness is scarce at Viacom and YouTube this week [newscloud.com]