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."
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.
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.
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').
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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...
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?
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.