In preparation for its sale to Google, YouTube is frantically purging all material on the site that violates copyright law. That's a lot of material, including all clips from Comedy Central shows, such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
Hitting the financial jackpot, it appears, may have created some headaches for YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site that has agreed to be bought by Google for $1.65 billion in stock.
The site late last week began purging copyrighted material from Comedy Central, including clips from YouTube stalwarts like 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.
The action was "a result of third-party notification by Comedy Central," according to one such e-mail message sent to a YouTube user, Jeff Reifman, who broke the news on the Web site NewsCloud.
A week earlier, nearly 30,000 clips of TV shows, movies and music videos were taken down after the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers cited copyright infringement.
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In an interview with Wired magazine in September 2005, Mr. Stewart explained his view: "We get an opportunity to produce this stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it's worth their while to do it. I mean, we know that's the game. I'm not suggesting we're going to beam it out to the heavens, man, and whoever gets it, great. If they're not making their money, we ain't doing our show."
YouTube is rife with copyright violations, which are now being cleaned up. Which raises the question: is it as valuable to Google when a lot of the best content has been removed?
