Written By Reprise Media | February 17, 2006 | Share This |

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In a blow to, well, themselves, lawyers for NBC ordered YouTube (a site for uploading and sharing video clips) to stop making an immensely popular Saturday Night Live sketch available for viewing and downloading (BoingBoing broke the news). More than five million YouTube visitors had already seen ‘Lazy Sunday,’ a parodic rap video featuring two laughably non-threatening comics bragging about their enjoyment of cupcakes from New York’s Magnolia bakery, their preference for Google Maps, and their plans to catch an afternoon screening of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Maybe five million new fans is enough for SNL?

NBC cited ‘copyright concerns’ as the official motive for pulling YouTube’s plug, and if it’s their quixotic quest to shut down everyone on the internet who hasn’t been specifically authorized to distribute ‘Lazy Sunday,’ they’ve got tons more ‘cease and desist’ orders to process. Google video still offers the skit for free - and their version bears a watermark from Collegehumor.com. And that’s not to mention the countless fans eager to spread the video to their friends, whether by hosting it themselves for download or emailing it. The video is too huge a hit to be easily bottled up by nickel-and-dime legal actions.

And that’s the really weird thing - since the video is such a monstrous success, why in the world would NBC want to stop people from seeing it? As a pop-culture touchstone, the sketch is largely credited with revitalizing the recently flaccid reputation of SNL. Its popularity sent many ‘Lazy Sunday’ fans who’d only seen the sketch online - count us among them - back to the tube to watch SNL for the first time in years. And at least at first, NBC appeared to embrace the skit’s vast internet audience. After ‘Lazy Sunday’ initially aired December 17th and caught fire online, NBC temporaily furnished it for free through iTunes (it now costs, like other iTunes videos, $1.99). They still host the video for free on their own website - although many have pointed out that NBC’s media player only works on machines running Windows, which could further alienate internet users.

So what gives? Techdirt thinks that NBC’s left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing:

For years, we’ve tried to remind people that lawyers understand the law, not business, and why management needs to learn that just because you can do something legally, it doesn’t mean you should. In too many cases, in fact, the lawyers are doing things without even consulting with the business team - and the end results are bad for the business…this is NBC biting the very hand that fed it a huge breakthrough with an audience that had been ignoring it.

We can’t stop shaking our heads over this mindboggling ploy; it’ll be as ineffective at curtailing copyright infringement as it’ll be effective at turning off potential viewers in SNL’s target demographic. As BoingBoing quipped, in a take off of one of the skit’s catchphrases, “Crazy, yes; delicious, no.”

Searchviews housekeeping note In observance of President’s Day, we will spend the Monday holiday observing presidents. But we’ll keep an eye on our feeds, and if something huge breaks over the long weekend, we’ll be on top of it. Otherwise, we’ll see you Tuesday morning.

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