Our story begins with the December 17th airing of Saturday Night Live. During that episode, a pretty funny rap video entitled Lazy Sunday: The Chronicles of Narnia was aired. The clip, starring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg as a couple of incredibly lame rappers walking through New York doing incredibly lame things, was uploaded to video download site YouTube.com, where it became something of an instant hit. Although we don't have statistics on the number of downloads, the video made enough of an impact to be featured in a New York Times story on SNL, and has been credited with turning a new generation of viewers on to the show.
Enter the lawyers. This week, NBC's lawyers sent a letter to YouTube, requesting removal of the video from its servers. The site complied with the request, and placed a short note on its blog explaining the removal and stating that "YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders." The video was also belatedly made available for free on the NBC web site, along with being offered as a US$1.99 download from the iTunes Music Store. As a side note, videos streamed from the NBC web site only work on Windows machines.
The blogosphere has picked up on this and chosen to make something of an issue out of it—specifically referencing what has been called NBC's mistake in taking a video clip that has help repopularize its aging SNL franchise and making it less available to the public.
This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere — not to mention the fan-made AIM icons and web banners. Viral means the stuff has a life of its own, guys, and that's what made it a hit.
There is certainly an argument to be made that NBC is doing itself a disservice by asking for the video's removal. Viral marketing can be a wonderful thing if handled properly, and Saturday Night Live has almost certainly reaped some benefit from the popularity of the clip. As another site put it:
For years, we've tried to remind people that lawyers understand the law, not business, and why management needs to learn that just because you can do something legally, it doesn't mean you should.
That's fine... and true, but the reverse is also true: just because you can do something illegally, doesn't mean you should, and that's exactly what happened when an SNL viewer (who may have meant no harm) uploaded the video to YouTube.
This has nothing to do with NBC's intelligence, or whether the legal arm of that company is in tune with the marketing arm. It is a simple matter of copyright infringement. Anything else is simple justification. YouTube knows this, which is why they removed the video when asked. A case can certainly be made that YouTube wasn't faced with much of a choice—the legal department at NBC almost certainly has a war chest far exceeding a decade's worth of YouTube revenues, but that doesn't make NBC wrong on this matter.
I fully plan to be raked over the coals by some readers. We here at Ars have been steadfast in our stance against oppressive technologies such as digital rights management (DRM) and oppressive laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It's important to keep in mind that our position on those issues is all about maintaining the rights we have—such as fair use. Misuse of DRM and the DMCA would take those rights away, and I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we are unwavering in our support for maintaining the rights of individual users.
Yet NBC has rights as well: Specifically, they have the right to do whatever they want with the video they produced, including selling it on iTMS, making it available only to Windows users, or putting it in storage for the next 75 years. It is completely their choice. They are even welcome to be stupid if they wish, although in this particular case it's arguable that they weren't even that. One can't help but notice that they pressed their rights to the video after the peak download period, putting them in the unusual position of having their cake and eating it too.
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