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Is Viacom censoring content?

Viacom_logo.gifAfter the Viacom cease and desist order was sent to YouTube a lot of clips were taken off of the YouTube servers. People like myself who use their embedded videos are having to go back and remove content or explain why videos are missing.

My previous post on Cingular's name change to AT&T (I mean at&t) used just such a video. I referenced a segment clip from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central where Steven Colbert explains the confusion surrounding the matter and the pure ego of at&t.

I just noticed this clip was one of the ones effected, so I went to look for a replacement. Comedy Central's site has most of Colbert's clips for viewing. But, for some reason the Cingular clip isn't there. I did a search on the word Cingular and had no results...except one entry with a Cingular promotion.

I am wondering if Comedy Central held this clip off on purpose to not piss off Cingular, or maybe I am just not seeing it (I've looked for a while though). It just makes me wonder, when a company like Viacom removes content publishing from the masses like this (and I just read that NBC may be the next company to go on the offensive), how does the consumer suffer? What else won't get posted to appease a sponsor.

I know that Viacom owns the content, but I don't know that removing it from the masses like this is beneficial to them. There are shows that I watch now because I saw clips on YouTube, there is no way I would have seen them otherwise, there is just too much content. More eyeballs are a good thing. Maybe Viacom is just a little bit jealous that they're not the ones who created YouTube.

(Oddly I did find the video available on Google Video Canada and another version on YouTube that hasn't been pulled yet.)


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