Last week saw the removal of a massive number of videos from the social video sharing site YouTube. This has been repeated today in a move that sees videos from the “Comedy Channel” being removed today after a DMCA from Viacom’s Comedy Central.

Clips from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are no more on YouTube. If you search for these terms or tags in YouTube it will still yeild results. However, If you try to view the video you get a message saying that they have been removed due to copyright infringement.

I am starting to wonder how many times this will be repeated and what will be left of the content after it is all over. Also interesting is the “take-downs” closely follow the YouTube acquision by Google. Perhaps as we have said on the podcast; media companies now see YouTube as a target as they know there is significant cash behind them. We are also unaware if Google have said that they want YouTube “cleaned-up” and that they do not want to be vulnerable to any legal action.

This is further demonstration that the majority of content on YouTube is in violation of copyright. That is not to say that there is no future for the service, but expect this to continue for a while. Unless YouTube manages to create an agreement, which seems to be the solution that they are falling back on in these circumstances.

As a side note, if you have a blog that features video be sure to check that the deletions do not result in broken video clips that you might have embedded in your posts. I am glad that I choose very early in the piece that I would not regularly use video on my blog. That said if you must use video be careful about what you choose. I would steer clear of videos from television programs for one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 1:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.