In their pursuit of financial gain, major corporations so often use old paradigms in the mistaken idea that they still work for today's issues. YouTube so often provides free advertising for various media entities, and sports leagues as well. Just look at the NBA, which has been the only one of the three (or four) major professional American sports that has allowed game video to remain on YT. I suspect they've benefitted in ways both large and small by doing this.

By contrast, the NFL and MLB have maintained an iron grip on their "property", thus depriving their fans of the opportunity to see game footage that they often have no other way of viewing. The NBA isn't losing any money by allowing the footage to stay, or at least it is far outweighed by what they gain. The same would no doubt be true of other sports.

In their zeal to "protect" their interests, so many companies and leagues do little more than shoot themselves in the foot or rob their own bank before the money is ever deposited.

i hope corporations hurry up and cannibalize themselves right out of existence. could there be a response more shortsighted and stupid and totally against the spirit and tradition of entertainment, news, and media in general....???

the good news is colbert isn't that essentially, earthshakingly funny or important...neither is most of the other copyrighted stuff on youtube...

BigMedia is going to exclude itself from the medium of the future? So that only amateur art remains viable and their empire crumbles to irrelevance?

Bring it on.

I don't know if you techno-geeks understand this, but in essence YouTube has, from the start, been mainly a criminal enterprise. The "killer apps" in the beginning of YouTube were entirely copyrighted properties. The entire house of YouTube is built on illegalities. To use a law term, it's all fruit from a rotted tree.

What you call free advertising, I call massive copyright infringement. Now, you can argue about copyright law all day long, but it is the law, and unless YouTube begins to pay the corporations for their lawlessness, art with shrivel. Real art, not a "picture per day for two years" performance art or firecrackers in the ass idiot art.

Get it through your heads that unless YouTube remains exclusively a place for trailers and public domain footage, someone along the line will have to pay. Would you rather pay? Or have the multi-billion dollar corporation pay?

And if you disagree that money must be exchanged, take a look at France after the revolution. They did away with their copyright laws entirely and the publishing world collapsed. In one year the laws were re-instated.

Get some respect for IP, people, seriously.

The "killer apps" in the beginning of YouTube were entirely copyrighted properties

Youtube was a "killer app" for internet video because it actually worked and you could watch videos in real time without 10 minutes of streaming.

Unlike the amazingly crappy Comedy Central site where Viacom wants us to get our Colbert clips.

If Viacom had fixed their site or just put authorized clips and ads up on Youtube, there wouldn't have been an infringement problem.

I have no sympathy. The media industry is run by idiots.

First, there is NO "cutting edge" technology that can stop copyright infringement on YouTube. Google is blowing smoke. Some Senior Developer colleagues and I have been hashing this out over lunch ever since the lawsuit was announced. My colleagues - both expert code jockies from top schools with years of experience - wracked their brains over it and in the end just shrugged and said "Never happen." Ditto other engineers I know with whom I've discussed this issue. There is no algorithm that can be created that could "see" what is in a clip that is uploaded and "know" it's copyrighted material. Although if Google does come up with that they will have created the first genuinely AI system. No, the only way to catch people who infringe is by the tags they assign to a video, and the title. That's assuming they're dumb enough to label their clips correctly, and right now they are. But neither YouTube nor Google are willing to invest the pure man-power it would take to run key word searches on every possible TV show, sports broadcast, music video, movie clip or commercial out there and delete all the offending videos. And with good reason: It would cost them a fortune. Also, they've already tried it on a limited scale and within 48 hours every single offending clip went right back up.

The other level is the notion that this is even copyright infringement to begin with. I must disagree with didlypop and state that this is nothing more or less than free advertising for every program that has clips running on YouTube. Period. And if posting a 25-year-old commercial for Bubbleyum Bubblegum is an infringement then in my opinion the DMCA should be rescinded, because it is overly broad and a sop to industry. Viacom is out of its mind to argue that it has lost money to clips of its programming posted to YouTube. If anything it has made money, and all Google would have to do to mount a vigorous defense is to demand in the discovery phase that Viacom open its books and show ratings levels for every single TV show both before and AFTER YouTube started up. Promising vaporware just isn't going to cut it.

Farhad,

yes, the YouTube/Slashdot defense, "it's hard to see how sports and comedy clips on YouTube do anything but help their copyright owners," is self-justification for copyright theft. Hey, don't get me wrong, it's great to see all this stuff for free but I know I am taking part in a theft enterprise. The copyright owners have rights to royalty payments on use of their material and YouTube has built its system on not paying them while distributing the material.

Neither do I see how sports 'benefit' from free distribution of their material. I am a (UK) soccer fan and nothing on YouTube would promote Premership soccer to me, I will watch and pay for it live/highlighted on fullscreen anyway. What is great about YouTube for a soccer fan is the archive footage, I appreciate YouTube has established that there is a market for this material and hope that the copyright owners see their current lawsuit as a wake up call to establishing their own distribution of this material - even through YouTube!

Rob Anderson :

the technological advances for video and audio signatures are almost with us, minding that I myself am not an expert in this area. Audio matching has been done (speech recognition, 'What's that tune' services) and there are some good ideas for video matching (mpeg compression blob movement signatures).

Again a YouTube/Slashdot defense that it is impossible to check clips for copyright infringement means that it is just fine (hey, even a 'moral imperitive') to ignore the copyright owner's rights. Obviously this is wrong in logic, law (c.f. Napster) and is just plain short-sighted about the consequences.

[I post anonymously to protect my identity from web search] Emm