Copyright
Rejoice! Every “Daily Show” ever is now online
Viacom builds an amazing new site for the show.
Hallelujah, every episode of “The Daily Show” will soon be online! Indeed, a great many episodes are here already.
If you’re at work today or are taking care of small children, please do not click on this link. It takes you to the amazing new site — thedailyshow.com — that Viacom has built for Jon Stewart and his pals, a place where you can find thousands of clips representing every instant of the show since 1999.
Think I’m kidding? Check this out: Jan. 19, 1999, a super-coiffed Stewart making fun of Bill Clinton. (Note: If the videos here don’t show up for you, wait, or reload the page; the new “Daily Show” site seems to be getting crushed under first-day traffic.)
And oh, there’s more. So, so much more.
As the L.A. Times reports, in order to make this happen, a team of 16 Comedy Central writers spent months tagging and encoding every episode of the show. Consequently you can search the site by date — there’s a handy timeline that allows you to go to any day in any year — or by keyword.
And what keywords! In addition to the expected ones — “moment of zen,” or “indecision” or George W. Bush — you can watch clips tagged “monkeys,” “gypsies,” “paranoia,” Ralph Nader, or one of many more.
Some quibbles: Though it is fantastically designed, the site is not perfect. It seems to contain a great many episodes of the show, but many are obviously missing — go back a few years in the timeline and you find some month with only two or three episodes included. These will surely be added in time.
Also, as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to restrict searches for certain keywords to specific dates, which makes it difficult to find, for instance, the first time Stewart mentioned, say, Dennis Kucinich.
But let me be clear: This is all quibbling!
Regular readers of this space know that in the past I have not been very kind to Viacom, Comedy Central’s corporate parent, for choosing to sue rather than working with Google’s YouTube in putting its videos online. Case in point, Viacom’s effort last month to pull down copies of Britney Spears MTV performance from YouTube — the company, I argued, could have made money by allowing that much-wanted clip to flow freely online.
This move represents a very smart move for the company. I mean to say: Oh Viacom, shame on me for having spurned thee. Curse me for my having questioned your prowess for online video, and bless thee unto the heavens for giving us this rich bounty of fake news.
The clips on the new site do include very short ads that show up intermittently, but they’re not at all annoying. Comparatively, on Comedy Central Motherlode, where the channel has long made available recent episodes of “The Daily Show” and its other programs, ads run 30-seconds long, they play often, and the same ones are repeated constantly — extremely frustrating.
A Viacom exec tells the Times that ad designers are experimenting with even less intrusive formats for the new “Daily Show” site, including “ads that appear for two or three seconds at the start of a clip, recede, then emerge briefly from a corner of the picture like a network-TV promo while the video continues playing.”
Whatever ad format it chooses, the company is sure to make a great deal from the new offering. “The Daily Show” is a program perfectly designed for the Web — short, pithy clips that are easily passed about, and funnier and smarter than any blogger you know.
That the show’s on television seems almost incidental now; the Web may come to represent its truest home.
And oh yeah, every clip is embeddable on other sites. So to celebrate, take a look at some bits I called up in the last few hours.
Oct. 18, 2000: The third presidential debate of 2000.
Oct. 16, 2007: Stephen Colbert on his presidential run.
June 8, 2003: Dennis Kucinich screams about WMD.
Sept. 19, 2001: Jon Stewart comes back after 9/11.
Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. More Farhad Manjoo.
Is it OK to steal “Downton Abbey”?
Obsessive TV fans are turning into shameless online pirates, as cult shows air in the U.K. before making it here
In an otherwise civil discussion of “Downton Abbey’s” second season, actor Hugh Bonneville let loose on an interviewer who casually let it slip that she’d gone online and viewed a pirated version of the British period drama’s Christmas special, which aired in the U.K. in December but won’t hit PBS until Feb. 19. This turned out to be the wrong thing to tell the man who plays proud patriarch Robert Crawley.
Continue Reading CloseDoes culture really want to be free?
Are new media companies "digital parasites"? The author of "Free Ride" tells Salon piracy is killing art
(Credit: l i g h t p o e t via Shutterstock) Over the last few weeks, Salon has been looking at the destruction of the creative class by the Internet, the recession and a transforming economy. A new book, “Free Ride,” by the journalist Robert Levine, intersects with some of these concerns. Subtitled “How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back,” Levine’s book looks at how publishing, the music industry, newspapers and other industries drank the dot.com Kool-Aid, effectively killing themselves off. He’s particularly interested in copyright, the U.S. government’s role in unleashing the Internet and the impact of digital piracy.
Continue Reading CloseScott Timberg is a former Los Angeles Times arts and culture writer who has also contributed to the New York Times, GQ and other publications. He is the co-editor of the book "The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles." He blogs at scott-timberg.blogspot.com/. More Scott Timberg.
Your favorite author, brought to you by a wealthy patron
As copyright erodes and the book industry changes, a combination of Kickstarter and the rich might fund writers
(Credit: iStockphoto/NickS) A passage from Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “Swerve,” on Renaissance book culture, has this to say about how writers paid their bills several centuries ago:
Continue Reading CloseAuthors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement — which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles — seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the 18th century.)
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Copyright concerns for “Wizard of Oz” prequel
Surprisingly, even a James Franco project isn't immune to legal battles over "iconic" images
"The Wizard of Oz." When you think about Dorothy’s slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” are they silver or ruby? How about the Wicked Witch … what color is she? What kind of dog is Toto?
Your answers to these questions are probably based on the 1939 MGM (now Warner Bros.) classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” and not the 1900 fairy tale “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” And unfortunately, this could mean trouble for Sam Raimi and James Franco’s new star-studded project, “Oz, the Great and Powerful,” according to a new ruling set by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
Mike Tyson’s tattoo artist can’t stop “Hangover II”
Despite a copyright lawsuit over the ink on Ed Helms' face, the show will go on
Tyson's tattoo on Helm's face. “The Hangover: Part II” premieres this week, despite an attempt at an injunction from the man who tattooed Mike Tyson’s face in 2003. A federal judge ruled that S. Victor Whitmill could not stop Warner Bros. from releasing the film, despite the artist’s claims that the movie infringed on his copyright of Tyson’s facial tattoo. Warner Bros. claims the image falls under fair use.
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
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