Exhibit 1: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are all over the internet, and Stephen Colbert talks about his YouTube popularity on the show. It’s the internet buzz that everyone on television wants for their own show.

Well...everyone except the folks who run the Comedy Central channel:

I received a couple of emails from YouTube this afternoon (see below) notifying me that a third party (probably attorneys for Comedy Central) had made a DMCA request to take down Colbert Report and Daily Show clips. If you visit YouTube, all Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park clips now show “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

This is legally correct-they own the show and have the right to control its use-but what the heck are they thinking?

I can understand the case for South Park. They sell the South Park seasons on DVD. As I write, the 8th season is in the top 200 of all DVDs sold on Amazon. If all the best parts of South Park are available free on YouTube, who will buy the DVDs?

But when it comes to the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, are they insane? What else are they going to do with the old episodes? It’s current events television. Nobody wants to even watch last year’s episodes on TV, let alone buy DVDs full of the stuff. Amazon has only one listing for Daily Show DVDs, and that’s for the Indecision 2004 Special

Exhibit 2: Universal Studios presumably decided to greenlight the movie Serenity largely because the series it’s based on, Firefly, had such a rabid fan base. To take advantage of this, they provided an unusually large amout of artistic and promotional material and encouraged fans to participate in the marketing of the movie by setting up web sites and printing bumper stickers.