NBC’s C&D To YouTube For SNL Video Clips; YouTube Complies

This had to happen sooner or later: NBC has asked video sharing site YouTube to take down clips from the hit SNL sketch “Lazy Sunday”, and the company has complied. NBC sent a notice to the compay askig to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under DMCA.

News.com: The video continues to reside on NBC’s official “SNL” site, though its embedded video player appears to work only with Windows. Curiously, the skit remains downloadable for free through Google’s video service. It’s also available for $1.99 at iTunes store.

NBC has contacted a number of other sites but declined to name which ones.

Jason Calacanis wrote about this earlier this month and had an interesting point: “These type of companies are leeches. They know that their business is predicated on people stealing content and they hide behind this silly disclaimer that users agreed that they owned the content they submitted. Yeah, right… the dozens of Saturday Night Live clips on your site are owned by the people who submitted them. Sure… whatever….Flickr is a community for people who create content, YouTube feels like a community build off people stealing content.”

But the last point is most important: “That being said, the people who own these videos are learning the hard lesson of the Internet: either you can make your content availabe, or your customers can.”

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