Viacom Pulls Clips Off YouTube. Again.
Looks like somebody’s getting greedy and playing hardball. Viacom just pulled clips off YouTube. Again. Viacom fans and remixers on YouTube — arguably Viacom’s most powerful viral marketers — are pissed. Henry Blodgett hits the nail on the head: this is a negotiating tactic sacrificing long-term growth to satisfy short-term greed. After getting stiffed in […]Click here to continue reading "Viacom Pulls Clips Off YouTube. Again."...Viacom Pulls Clips Off YouTube. Again.
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It always amuses me whenever I hear this kind of stupidity from dumb execs.
No more Daily Show or Colbert Report on YouTube? Fine. I will never use YouTube again.
Oh, and since this is the second time this happens, I have totally lost my patience with YouTube, Viacom, and Comedy Central. You don’t want me as viewer? Fine. I will watch something else, somewhere else. Forget that I even found out about the Daily Show on YouTube… These stupid losers think that people spend all day long in front of the TV. Not any more. I watch what I want when I want. If you take it away, I won’t chase you to your little TV show at the time you decide. I forget you and move on to something else…
It seems Viacom’s hardball tactics even extend to just its logo in the corner of the screen. Hundreds of old “Sesame Street” clips got yanked (and their posters got barred), even though the clips had been there for months, and, technically, Viacom doesn’t own the material; Sesame Workshop does (and it doesn’t seem to have a problem, because it knows that clips on YouTube are great advertising). BUT! A lot of those clips had been taped off Noggin, which is owned by Viacom, and as such, they had the Noggin logo in the corner of the screen. So Viacom ordered them taken down, because of that logo, not because Viacom actually owned the content of the clip. It’s as though an original user-created clip happened to have a TV in the background, on which “Spongebob” was playing. Even though that TV was so tiny and quiet that you could scarcely detect it, Viacom would claim copyright infringement and order the clip removed.
I’ve heard of quite a lot of cases of totally innocent, totally original clips, with nothing at all to do with any Viacom content or product, being arbitrarily removed.
As for me, with the huge amounts of spam I’ve gotten since registering on YouTube, not to mention the hassle of weeding through 1000-word blocks of keyword spam (much of it containing obscenities) in order to find what I’m looking for, I’ve left YouTube. If they’re going to go at this like someone using an atomic bomb to kill a housefly, I say, to hell with them all. In England, the equivalent of the Finger is the V-Sign. And that’s precisely what I’m giving to YouTube and to Viacom.