This Wednesday, Improv Everywhere posted its latest video of hijinks on the New York Subway, this time involving a bunch of dudes wearing Stormtrooper costumes. The video has received more than 1.1 million views so far, and was picked up by a number of viral aggregate sites, including Buzzfeed.
It also got picked up by Gawker.TV. Sort of. Late Wednesday night, Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd was informed by a friend that Gawker Media’s video-obsessed blog had posted about Star Wars Subway Car.
The catch was that, instead of embedding the YouTube version of the video, the video blog ripped the video from YouTube, removed Improv Everywhere’s logo, and reposted it using the Gawker.TV player. And the video link at the bottom went to Buzzfeed.com, not Improv Everywhere. “Usually when a big blog covers Improv Everywhere I know right away because I see the traffic in my logs,” Todd said via email. “But since they didn’t bother to link to our site, I didn’t catch it.”
Todd first wrote a sarcastic and angry blog post about the issue (from which the above screenshot is borrowed), then emailed Gawker.TV to request that it replace its video with the original YouTube version, along with a link back to ImprovEverywhere.com.
Gawker.TV editor Richard Blakeley answered Todd’s request promptly (as you can see in the current version of the post), claiming that it was a “mistake and an oversight.”
However, Todd told NewTeeVee, “While it was cool to get the post fixed, the damage had been done as it had already been up for a day and had long since moved off their front page.”
For Improv Everywhere content, like other viral videos, the first 24 hours of a video’s life are key to their spread — the more views they get in a short time, the more likely it is that they’ll make it onto YouTube’s Most Viewed listings. So for Todd, “It’s pretty important for our YouTube video to be the one and only version people are watching and spreading.”
According to lawyer Cydney A. Tune, who leads Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP’s Copyright practice section, “Looking at this situation, there’s definitely copyright infringement going on, because there’s been a copy made without permission.
“The funny thing about it is that it’s so easy to do it right,” she added. “It’s not the type of infringement problem where they can argue there was no other way to get it, that it’s fair use for some reason. Instead of doing it the right way, which is easy, they’re choosing to do it this way for a reason.” Tune said that there would be no doubt of Todd having a legal claim to make against Gawker.TV for lost ad revenue and views, though she declined to say if she thought it would be successful.
According to Todd, though, “It’s honestly not about the money. We’re not going to make much revenue off of Google AdSense text ads popping up a few thousand times on a blog. It’s more about respecting content creators. It’s just dirty to take someone else’s content and hijack traffic for your own site.”
Gawker.TV did not respond to repeated requests for comment. We’ll update this story if that changes.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline


{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2010\/07\/16\/gawker-tv-re-edits-reposts-improv-everywhere-video\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_29dd317fe7b491100e18e9d134e8174e","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}