Come for the Ride…

While watching the NBC news tonight, the big discussion was about how Obama copied a small portion of the speech from another governor and how Hilary copied some of Bill’s speech from years prior to help make their points.  While making the point on air, they showed clips of Deval Patrick from YouTube to point out the similarity in the words.  I wasn’t so into the topic as I was with the technology NBC was using, which were clips of very poor quality from YouTube.

Now, as a national broadcasting company with years and years of video in archive, surely they must have the exact same clip in higher quality locked in a vault somewhere.  Why would a nationally praised news program forgo digging up video of higher quality and instead show grainy videos from YouTube and call it a day?  Are we now getting lazy? Could it be because NBC is flat out admitting YouTube’s search and video distribution services are way better and easier than having a staff on board whose job is to dig up old videos?

Now, if everyone wants to play nice then this would be fine… in a perfect world old business would mix with the new and we would all share our toys.  However, NBC is the same company that has repeatedly banned their own videos from appearing on YouTube due to copyright violations.  Awesome clips of SNL (who no one watches anymore except YouTube helped revived it) have been removed repeatedly at the request of NBC.  Bummer for all of us who choose to have a life on Saturday nights but also wanted to check out things like Dick-in-a-Box or the People getting punched video.

So to be fair, I think NBC should be banned from using anything from YouTube on its broadcasts.  If you’re not going to share your toys, I don’t see why you should be allowed to play with everyone else’s.  When you showed the grainy video on your nationally televised news program, did the guy who stood in the crowd and filmed the grainy video get paid for their efforts?  Most likely not… so where do you guys really stand on your own copyright policies?

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