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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."
DUH.
While Google has a pretty good track record, there have been a few flops. This may prove to be one of them.
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1) Buy YouTube
2) Wait for all of the content to be removed
3) ???
4) profit!
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
If you RTFA "I received a couple of emails from YouTube this afternoon (see below) notifying me that a third party (probably attorneys for Comedy Central) had made a DMCA request to take down Colbert Report and Daily Show clips.". There is no mention whatsoever of a lawsuit.
The corner of a round room
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.
Google could just pick up Comedy Central for a fraction of the cost of YouTube, if the clips were really that important to people.
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
Dear Member:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Comedy Central claiming that this material is infringing:
Steve Wozniak on Colbert Report 09/28/2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSIfYgbajpk
Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.
If you elect to send us a counter notice, to be effective it must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially the following (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(g)(3) to confirm these requirements):
(A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
(B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
(C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
(D) The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriberis address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
Such written notice should be sent to our designated agent as follows:
DMCA Complaints
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Ave.
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
Email: copyright@youtube.com
Please note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.
Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.
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!
Oh My God, the DCMA killed Youtube! Those bastards!
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.
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.
True, but it's even more valuable to get that free marketing plus a kickback from Google. Google probably saw this coming a mile away...I'd be amazed if their plan for buying YouTube didn't involve some sort of sustainable business model like using ad revenue to pay copyright holders of high-profile content...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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 :-/
... just go to dailymotion instead.
Up yours DMCA and comedy central!
God Be Gone
I guess this is just the start. So I guess Google paid $1.65M for lonelygirl15 and cats flushing the toilet videos. Outstanding!
No I don't, it's Comedy Central that needs YouTube not the other way around. As there's far more cable television access than broadband in the US, I imagine everyone who wants Comedy Central already has it and that's not what actally drives traffic to YouTube. What drives traffic to YouTube is interesting content you can't get anywhere else. The people who are going to YouTube are a demographic that traditional broadcasters are desperate to reach: young, wealthy trendsetters. Those kinds of people are increasingly entertaining themselves and think of the big broadcasters as greedy providers of costly, government censored and advert filled shows. If the big broadcasters want to keep selling to people, they need companies like YouTube. People will still go to YouTube to both post and find first rate entertainment, regardless of what Comedy Central does.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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Someone better get a kick out of this. I spent enough time writing it.
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
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?
I think a more likely case is that Comedy Central files a bunch of DMCA requests, and a bunch got taken down. But a "bunch" is hardly "all." And more will be uploaded. The DMCA is a deeply flawed tool (the mandatory takedown window even if you challenge the takedown is nothing less than an infringement of the first amendment), but in this case it's a copyright infringers friend. YouTube is not legally required to police for Comedy Centrals content, only to take content down when informed. Google (YouTube's new owner) has a very slow DMCA processing system (as someone whose used it, I can confirm this). So just don't worry about it. The total amont of infringing content may go down, and older stuff might be harder to find, but there will be lots of Comedy Central on YouTube for a long time.
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When you click on the videos, are they available?
Youtube's indexer has never been just super-current. Oftentimes I'd click on a video only to find that it'd been removed due to terms of use violations.
This is the part I don't get. Comedy Central itself links to Daily Show and Colbert Report clips on Youtube. So who, then, issued the DMCA requests, and why didn't they let the webmaster know?
This makes no sense.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
http://dailymotion.com/ it's filled to the brim with episodes of tv shows that it's users have uploaded
This is also based on some other stuff I read in the other comments.
1. Whatever happened to common sense? Does viewing these clips online really hurt the show? Does it stop people from watching the show when it's on t.v.? Does it really stop people from buying episodes of the show when they wish to have a true copy of it? No. The people who are going to buy it is going to be roughly the same as before. This is simply alienating people from enjoying something that makes them happy.
2. I bet a lot of polisci professors are going to be angry that they cannot get copies of it anymore for their classes. Yes, some polisci professors do use clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, if I'm not mistaken.
3. Bend over America, corporate greed wants more of you.
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.
It's only dead if you think that "the little guy" never makes and uploads anything interesting.
While it's more profitable for a large corporation to police copyright violations (so people are forced to get their daily dose of the Stewart on their network, for example), for independent filmmakers, machinima artists, and small-time .com's, having material on YouTube is an asset; it makes people aware of the fact that they're out there, making things. It builds a fanbase, and that's important to them -- unless they're complete marketing n00bs, they won't request for their content to be taken down.
And besides, home videos of cats flushing toilets are pretty funny.
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.
My colleagues and I have learned a lesson from Napster, game ROM download sites and the like. That lesson is if there's anything downloadable that you like, then you'd better start downloading like crazy as soon as you find it.
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
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.
"A lot of shows wouldn't be so popular if it weren't for downloading or watching them on the internet."
r tainers/executives/etc. have no right to be paid millions upon millions for their lack of work in society."
You say that as if it were a fact, instead of just your opinion. I feel they get watched on the net because they are popular to begin with.
"Actors/actresses/musicians/artists/athletes/ente
You say that as if it were a fact, instead of the opinion of someone who probably doesn't produce anything worth paying large amounts of money for. Sour grapes, m'thinks.
"That is why we have our rights being stomped out."
You say that as if...
Well, you get the point. You are expressing your opinions only.
P.S.
"Yes they entertain but the priority of entertainment shouldn't be as high as it is."
From someone willing to breach the artist's copyright to access said entertainment. Ironic hypocracy.
I know that. What I want to know is how Google "flopped" when YouTube complied with a reasonable request
The reason so many are claiming Google has made a mistake in purchasing YouTube is the presumption that the primary value of YouTube is the illegal distribution of copyrighted content. Many people, and many /.ers, assume user-created content is valueless and cannot be the center of a viable online business model, despite the success of sites that depend on user contributions, /. itself being a prime example.
Google has not misstepped. The only thing that has misstepped is some /.ers' senses that with the end of an easy means to violate copyright using YouTube so ends the commercial value of YouTube as a whole.
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Who cares if it makes a profit? They got so far behind them in terms of competition, maybe this was the easiest way...