This weekend Viacom decided to throw some weight around, sending 100,000 DMCA notices to YouTube, telling them to take down any clip that came up when any of their shows were searched for. That not only means that clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will be harder to come by now, but that clips even coincidentally titled similarly to any Viacom property have been taken down.
With that volume of requests, Google doesn't have the manpower to check to see if all of the clips are actually copyrighted material. And it seems like Viacom just told them to remove everything that came up during certain searches, meaning they didn't verify each clip either. Yes, two gigantic companies are working together to censor online videos, with neither of them actually bothering to make sure they aren't removing thousands upon thousands of legitimate content. They're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
This is terrible, and Google needs to pony up the dough to make sure their service isn't being completely perverted by these corporate thugs. And hey, Viacom: screw you. This kind of severe, anti-consumer action is not how you win loyalty.
Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bullshit DMCA notices [Boing Boing]
Viacom yanks Daily Show from Youtube [ValleyWag]
DISCUSSION
Do you believe Viacom actually has to check every single entry to verify it has questionable material, knowing that probably over 95% of it is their material? People have been posting clips from their shows illegally for some time now, and it is not their responsibility to verify every item. Knowing the obvious percentage of infringement, it makes complete sense that Viacom hand over a massive list and say 'remove it all' and that they would need to comply.
Uh... but... they do have to check every single entry to verify that its copyright. I mean, if you want to follow copyright law, that is. Just searching for a phrase then demanding that every video that references that phrase in its title or describtion doesn't mean every video is violating the copyright. What search terms did they use? "Music television"? "Comedy"? "Video"? "Daily"? There's no telling what they searched for to get what results. A HUGE corporation like Viacom has plenty of manpower *cough* interns *cough* to search through these videos and pick the hundreds (or thousands or millions or whatever number you want to pick) that DO violate the copyright law, then demand those be taken down. Especially considering right now they're just acting like a schoolyard bully, without really checking to see if they're following the law or not, just hoping to use their size and name-brand recognition within the industry to get YouTube to take down said videos.