Well, the hits are coming thick and fast at YouTube — or GooTube, or whatever we’re calling it now. According to one report, YouTube has responded to another takedown notice, this time from Comedy Central, and has removed all the South Park, Colbert Report and Daily Show video clips (other than ones of a few minutes or less, which presumably might fall under fair use provisions of copyright law — Mark Kuznicki has more on that here).
I guess it’s a good thing I already watched that hilarious South Park episode where Cartman and the gang start playing World of Warcraft only to repeatedly die at the hands of an uber-player. Of course, if I hadn’t seen it already, I could always go and watch the whole thing at DailyMotion — which is hosting this version that’s on the gaming blog Kotaku, or I could watch it at GameTrailers.com
Interestingly enough, there are no South Park episodes at Google Video either. In the past, YouTube has removed video clips due to takedown notices but the same clips have lived on at Google Video. I guess that won’t be happening any more, now that they are part of the same entity. For those keeping score at home, this is the third mass takedown YouTube has done — the others being the 30,000 or so Japanese videos it removed about a week ago, and a bunch of sports clips.
And no, just for the record, this still doesn’t make Mark Cuban right.
Update:
As this Washington Post story points out, and blogger Howard Owens also describes, it seems that there are still plenty of Comedy Central videos available on YouTube, although many of the show-length ones are gone. Did Newscloud overplay the email it got from YouTube, or are the content owners drawing a distinction between short clips and full shows? I hope it’s the latter, as this post from Jeff Jarvis indicates.