YouTube Video Purge Continues

Posted on October 30, 2006

The New York Times reports that YouTube is continuing to purge copyrighted videos including videos from popular Comedy Central shows like The Daily Show and South Park.

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.

The Times says YouTube did not respond to its repeated inquiries. That might be why there was a delay in this being reporting by the Times. Several bloggers including Download Squad, Boing Boing, Matthew Ingram and John Battelle were already discussing the Comedy Central YouTube purge over the weekend.

Other recently pulled content includes sports videos and copyrighted Japanese videos.