sandbox films: NBC sends YouTube Take-Down Notice for SNL Lazy Sunday

YouTube received a take-down notice from NBC regarding the SNL Lazy Sunday video. That was sure a long time coming. Here's what YouTube says on their blog:

NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website.
This response from YouTube must be firmly tongue-in-cheek. They "respect the rights of copyright holders"?! Give me a break. There's tons of infringing content all over YouTube. There's no way they could possibly plead ignorance here (they even hired the brother of one of the SNL sketch writers to be their "director of community" soon after they struck gold with this clip)... its clear that the video was infringing from the moment it was posted onto the site. Its an entire clip from SNL, not an excerpt, and certainly not fair use. Its got an NBC watermark on it.

At what point was YouTube given permission to re-broadcast this video to millions of viewers through their website? Its not like this was file sharing amongst a few friends, this was re-broadcasted on a video portal site to millions of viewers. This is like CBS recording Saturday Night Live and then airing it the next day... and everyday after that for weeks. YouTube quite obviously benefits from video plaigarism of this sort all the time... but then again they're not alone.

This clip was all over the internet. It was also on CollegeHumor.com, and yanked from there by Google Video (obvious from the CollegeHumor watermark, so its a copy of a copy on Google). It was probably on several other video hosting sites and portals (there's a lot of them out there now), as well as on several personal websites.

NBC later released the clip as a free download on iTunes (its now $1.99), and they offer it for free viewing on their website (only for PC users with Internet Explorer).

Of course, some people think that YouTube should be congratulated for their copyright infringing practices. Here's what Xeni Jardin says about it on BoingBoing:

This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere
Sorry, Xeni, that's completely wrong. In the same blog entry where YouTube responds to the take-down notice they also say:

YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month
So how exactly are they different from a TV network? How are they exempt from the laws and standard practices of the industry?