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Viacom's Messy Relationship With YouTube and The Rise of Stephen Colbert
Presto Vivace writes with this story about how Stephen Colbert became a YouTube Megastar. "Clips from The Colbert Report soon became a staple at YouTube, a startup that was making it easier for anyone and everyone to upload and watch home movies, video blogs, and technically-illicit-but-increasingly-vanilla clips of TV shows from the day before. And Colbert’s show was about to find itself at the center of a conflict between entertainment media and the web over online video that’s shaped the last decade. In fact, The Colbert Report has been defined as much by this back-and-forth between Hollywood and the web as by the cable news pundits it satirizes....A year after The Colbert Report premiere, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Five months later, Viacom sued YouTube and Google for copyright infringement, asking for $1 billion in damages. The value of these videos and their audiences were clear. The Colbert Report and “Stephen Colbert” are mentioned three times in Viacom’s complaint against YouTube, as much or more than any other show or artist."
So what if the FBI is investigating. Why do you expect your assumptions to coincide with their conclusions? Any large following will have a few crackpots making threats. Feminists do it too (the scum manifesto comes to mind, all the way to the amanda marcott types). I suppose you are just as eager for their crackpots to go to jail right? Somehow, I doubt it.
The last thing we should be doing is folding to these professional victims. Colbert (or his boss) was a coward. Out of all the flack comedy central gets for shows like southpark, it's anita sarkeesian's pity party that makes them fold? Something doesn't add up.