YouTube Pulling Comedy Central Clips? Not Necessarily

This morning’s New York Times reported that YouTube is “purging” copyrighted clips — from some of YouTube stalwarts like the Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park — in preparation for the finalizing of its $1.65 billion sale to Google.

The Times, however, was relying on “‘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.” YouTube did not respond to the Times.

FishbowlNY spent about 25 minutes on YouTube this afternoon, and the news of an all-out purge seems to have been a bit premature. For instance, a user named “SouthParkSeason10” reports he “just recently got suspended,” yet his “Director’s Channel” page continues to play clips of the show.

A simple search for “south park” turned up 6,714 results — and not one of the handful of clips we checked [including the one above] had been pulled.

According to some users, it appears that clips under 5 minutes in were not removed. Those over 5 minutes were.

YouTube has yet to respond to FishbowlNY’s e-mails seeking comment.

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