NBC Erases SNL Sketch From Digital Archive For Fear of Copyright Lawsuit

M.Nunez writes with a tale of copyright woes. From the article: "The digital 'Saturday Night Live' archive does not feature a recent Bruno Mars sketch because it includes impersonations of pop singers and their chart-topping hits. Bruno Mars sings several songs that are not owned by NBC, so it can be presumed that the company refrained from uploading the sketch into its digital archive to avoid any legal issues. Convoluted music licensing laws have essentially erased the Bruno Mars sketch from the digital archives of SNL. In the short comedy sketch, Bruno Mars impersonates vocal performances by Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day), Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Louis Armstrong, and Michael Jackson. The sketch cannot be found on NBC.com or Hulu, as a short clip or in either full editions of the episode."

Comments

Crowd-sourced solution

[Anonymous Coward]

"The digital 'Saturday Night Live' archive does not feature a recent Bruno Mars sketch because it includes impersonations of pop singers and their chart-topping hits.

This is the problem with proprietary archives - the host gets to decide what goes in. Someone should go out and invent a distributed system where people can store files locally but share them with anyone else who is interested. If you cut the file into little pieces, you could even get the file from a bunch of other people simultaneously, cutting down the time and sharing the burden. All you'd need would be someone who agrees to record TV shows off the air, then compress and share the files. Admittedly this system relies a lot on volunteers, but it just might work.

Re:Let Me Say

[erroneus]

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7747455/Saturday.Night.Live.S38E05.Bruno.Mars.720p.HDTV.x264-BAJSKORV_%5BP

It happened.

It was pretty good I guess. I think the point of this article is to highlight how ridiculous this has all become. Parody is ALWAYS protected and he mixed up the words [ostensibly] as a form of parody expression. But rather than fight about it, they [too] would rather give up and give in.

They can't even be civil among themselves, so what hope to we, the little people, have in dealing with this bastards?

NBC does not want more fair use case law

[djl4570]

Maybe NBC and it's parent corporation realized the original parody was fair use. They redacted it from the archives because they don't want bots sending DMCA notices and they don't want to take them to court and argue fair use.

Copyright is to protect the musicians, right?

[houghi]

Luckily we have copyright to protect the artists like Louis Armstrong and Michael Jackson. Otherwise they would just stop making music.