YouTube vs Comedy Central – The smell of Humble Pie in the morning

I hate the smell of humble pie in the morning! Well, I suck so I am facing up to it. (smile)

I was very wrong in my analysis on the issue of Comedy Central/Viacom DMCA video take down on YouTube. I made a mistake in assuming Viacom will never be short-sighted enough to risk angrying thousands of loyal fans of it Comedy Central shows. But I was wrong. At the moment, some bloggers are quite vocal. So will see how will the events unfold in the next few days or weeks or months …

Viacom seems to be very willing to disregard the impact to the many bloggers (like myself) who link to Daily show’s clips and these clips are linked to a copyright notice now.

And I am real sorry that my previous statistical analysis was wrong too! The errors came from me unwittingly assuming search results returned by YouTube were valid links when they were not. I accept responsibility of my mistakes and I hope you will forgive me.

Without further adieu, and thanks a ton to Jeff at idealog, here are some in-depth and insightful analysis of this YouTube mess.

1. “78% of Daily Show Clips Missing from YouTube“
2. “YouTube Comedy Central DMCA Notices Continue“
3. “Analysis of Comedy Central Content on YouTube“
4. “What Viacom Thinks of Your Web Site“

And I should also point out that most of my Jon Stewart clips links will not work at the moment. Thanks to Viacom, it sucks! I think Viacom should get paid for their copyrighted videos by YouTube (some sort of revenue sharing will be fine). But I also think Viacom will pay a price eventually for angrying thousands of fans but it is too early to say what will the unintended consequence of Viacom’s actions be. Will see.