A bizarre copyright claim against the Daily Show
Major League Baseball Beans Jon Stewart, and Obama’s Pitch Vanishes
What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.
The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use†terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.
None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.
