Regarding: Viacom asks YouTube to purge certain clips

Many are speculating on the latest request by Viacom (read: Comedy Central) that YouTube (read: Google) take down clips of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and South Park. I’m not speculating on the business dealings… it’s typical copyright protection by a popular source. I’m just disappointed that such “hip, young sources of entertainment,” that are usually so clever and cutting edge with their business dealings, missed such a fantastic, progressive opportunity.

Blinded by the Status-Quo

I understand the concepts of intellectual property; my division at Cerner is named Intellectual Property. I also understand that the digital revolution, in all its many forms, frightens content providers. I also don’t believe these startled, reactionary tactics of lawsuits, actions and requests-that-aren’t-really-requests are going to end any time soon. I’m fully prepared to wait until the Gen-Y’ers reach the upper eschelons of management for a good compromise to be reached. In less time that it took me to wear out my first car, innovations such as the iPod, CD Ripping and media centric PCs prompted DRM, bulk lawsuits and ISP interrogations.

Business has never responded quickly to innovations in technology. Case-in-point: it was YEARS before my PC was able to detect that I was attempting the digital equivalent of VCR dubbing. (Ed. Note: Before someone decides to sue me, I was taking an excerpt from a DVD I owned for a presentation at work…) Business strategy has always been reactionary. So what’s my beef this time?

A Lost Library

From the New York Times:

“The situation is tricky for a network like Comedy Central, part of Viacom. Its audience is young and technologically sophisticated, and Comedy Central stars in the past have YouTube and clip services to interact with their audience.

“Stephen Colbert of ‘The Colbert Report,’ for example, gained great attention for his mocking speech before President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner, which became one of the most-viewed clips at YouTube before C-Span, which broadcast the event, ordered it taken down.

“In an interview with Wired magazine in September 2005, Mr. Stewart explained his view: ‘We get an opportunity to produce tis stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it… If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.’”

I’ll be the first to admit I had several clips marked as favorites in YouTube that are now most likely deleted:

• Colbert’s laughing fit while describing a Royal Family scandal;
• Stewart’s hilariously funny and biting commentary on the use of the question mark as a disarming tactic in major news networks;
• Cartman’s parody of “Dog: the Bounty Hunter” in the most recent episode of South Park.

I don’t watch TV… I rely on the likes of YouTube and SpikedHumor to supply me with clips of the few shows I like and have missed because I have no cable. But more importantly: I don’t want to wait for the these clips to come out on DVD, nor do I want to search through them for the short bit I want to see. The beauty of these online libraries is that they are as robust as their fanbase is large.

YouTube was the online expression of a Venn Diagram of YouTube and Comedy Central “users…” and that merged area was massive. These individuals posted their favorite clips of their favorite shows to an online repository, which happened to be shared with people of like interests. Now, all of those clips, many existing dozens of times over, are gone.

Are you starting to see where I’m headed here?

A Confusing Change in Policy

So why were these clips deleted? Well, it’s obvious it’s about the “lost” advertising dollars. Many point to the existence of Comedy Central’s MotherLoad, an online library of select clips of popular shows and comedians. Of extreme interest to me was the fact that before this announcement, only certain parts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, carefully titled, existed in the MotherLoad. I know this because I used both YouTube and The MotherLoad to catch up on what I’m missing; frankly, The MotherLoad was often of a higher quality.

When I look at the RSS feed from Comedy Central today, however, it’s a totally different story. They’ve gone to dividing the show into parts… parts delimited by where the commercial breaks would normally be.

Wha? Are you insane? Didn’t you delete the YouTube clips because they cut in on your revenue? To be fair, they did show me some ridiculous advertisement about some dude living out of his Nissan Altima for a week… but, come on. That surely couldn’t cover the expense of keeping these clips online.

Frankly, it’s a piss-poor change. It smacks of an immature “hey, that’s mine” mentality prevalent in archaic approaches to IP. It has always turned people off. The whole point of the Internet is dissemination of information, not its stockpiling.

On the Internet, you can always find it somewhere else; the only currency that really matters is surfer loyalty. And YouTube was loaded.

Make Love, Not War

I don’t think Viacom thought entirely hard enough about how much this might piss people off. I don’t think Google/YouTube thought about how many users would stop visiting their site if they thought they couldn’t get Comedy Central clips, (you’re reading the blog of one of them).

So what would be my proposition?

For starters, Google has a proven indexing capability. Given a few months, I’d be willing to bet their wiz-kids could have come up with an algorithm that identified all of these clips and organized them. Then, it would be as simple as creating a channel. Professional clips could be uploaded by Viacom, amatuer clips could be tagged. Call it, The YouTube MotherLoad. They could have even gone as far as to earmark the category for Viacom’s advertising dollars. Hell, you could precede them with the 15-second, nonsense Nissan clips if you wanted. In other words, they could have used the offending technology to their advantage. Utilized YouTube’s bandwidth, their fans passion, and their IP to create a money making machine.

Now, all they’ve done is create yet another mash-up opportunity where some start up or whiz kid puts together some RSS-scanning feed to provide links to the clips everyone wants to see. Frankly, I’d just as soon Viacom and YouTube/Google come to some kind of arrangement where my favorite clips can be accessed as easily as they were before.

I think that’s all anyone (who isn’t trying to make or protect money off of it) wants.