The original video of Lawrence Lessig being interviewed about copyright and his new book “REMIX” on the Colbert Report has been taken down from youtube. This seems to be due to a copyright claim by Viacom or more likely an automatic response by a Viacom legal bot. We did two remixes of this exact video and that hasn’t been taken down yet. I often wonder what is the big offense that has been caused by posting a few minutes (in our case a few seconds) of video online.

I just don’t feel like we are robbing and abusing these content owners by remixing and putting their material on youtube, most of them are bending over backwards to get views on youtube anway. Now I know Viacom is in dispute with Youtube and this a lot of the background beef but you’d think they could overlook one video, especially one where the subject is copyright and it’s excessive appliance by big companies. Or they could be like Motown who instead of being dicks about it saw what we were doing with motown artists (who we love and respect) and asked us to do official work for Motown, of which you can see a sneak peek here.