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."
My (limited non lawyerly) understanding of US copyright law and the DMCA is that as long as google removes any content when requested by the copyright holder, they are safe legally (for much the same reasons Geocities or Photobucket is not legally required to activly police every upload to hosted homepages/photo albums).
Or was there a specific takedown request from comedy central?
D'oh... The fact that Colbert could be found in so many places on YouTube was a running joke on Colbert itself, that's how integral YouTube had become. Though really, do 5-minute clips of the show threaten Comedy Central's revenue model, or help it? An iTunes purchase is never going to hit the front page of Digg, it's never going to be linked to en masse by blogs. I guess Comedy Central does post their own clips, but they seem hard to navigate through.