Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"?
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...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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!
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.
Dog is my co-pilot.
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 :-/
I guess this is just the start. So I guess Google paid $1.65M for lonelygirl15 and cats flushing the toilet videos. Outstanding!
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!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
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.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey