As we mentioned in the Morning Reboot, YouTube has begun to remove all of its hosted clips from Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park in compliance with a DMCA request. There's no official word on who made the request, but the most likely candidate is Viacom, the media company that owns Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and several other television and film outlets.
The news was broken by Jeff at NewsCloud, who notes that most of the Comedy Central videos on YouTube have been replaced with a statement along the lines of "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."
I started seeing that message last week when I tried to view a
Japanese music video that I have bookmarked in my YouTube channel, and
that lead me to find the story that a group of Japanese media companies demanded YouTube remove close to 30,000 Japanese music, TV and film clips.
It's really no surprise that media companies are cracking down on
YouTube, but what is surprising is that it's all happening now, within
a month of Google's acquisition of the video sharing service. The first
high-profile video removal was "Lazy Sunday," which we wrote about
in February, and there have been a few removal demands sent to YouTube
in the intervening months, but things have sped up since the company
has been in the hot seat.
I just did some quick searches on YouTube. There are still several Colbert and Daily Show
videos up on YouTube right now, so they haven't taken all of them down
just yet. There are also a significant amount of videos from other
Viacom properties on YouTube today, including clips from VH1's "We Love the 80s" and MTV's "Total Request Live."
So, is this just a Comedy Central thing? Or is Viacom going to go after YouTube one TV channel at a time?
