Ah, stupid copyright licensing rules block perfectly normal activities yet again. This past weekend, Saturday Night Live ran a mildly amusing skit involving a power outage at internet streaming radio company, Pandora, in which an intern -- played by Bruno Mars -- has to step in and sing a variety of songs to keep the streams running. It's a slightly hacky trick to show off Mars' singing mimicry, but done pretty well. While NBC has had a somewhat ridiculous love/hate affair with putting SNL clips online. Over the past few years, it's finally realized that viral clips are an important promotional vehicle for the show. Yet... this clip is not online on NBC.com or Hulu, where SNL normally puts its clips... because (of course) music licensing online makes it an impossibility. The TV shows have licenses for TV broadcast, but they don't apply to internet streams (which is why you see some shows change out their music on Hulu). Yet, here, the clip doesn't work at all without the actual music.

Of course, this is the internet, so the clip was quickly uploaded all over the place, and while some of those sources have already seen it pulled down, others still seem to have it up. At the time of this posting, eBaum's World appears to have a working copy. Of course, having now seen it, it would seem like there's a pretty strong parody defense claim if anyone argued they were infringing. Mars parodies many of the songs, changing or garbling the lyrics, which is a big part of the joke. But, of course, that would require NBC Universal to actually have the guts to fight in court for fair use -- and even just thinking that I think I heard some laughter coming from Rick Cotton's offices.

The end result, though, is nothing but stupidity. NBC doesn't get to show the clip more widely and get the promotional benefits. It also doesn't get the ad revenue that would have gone alongside its own hosted clips. Instead, other sites get the attention and the traffic.

Danny Sullivan has an amusing blog post about his attempt to track down a Saturday Night Live skit that he wanted to watch online. Given how key the online audience has been to SNL over the past five years, you would think that, by now, NBCUniversal would have this process down cold, and would have all the skits easy to access and ready to go. Instead... for whatever reason, it doesn't have this particular skit that Sullivan wanted ("Downton Abbey Meets Spike TV"). He checked the official SNL page. No luck. He checked Hulu. No luck. Then he went digging... and he found lots of unauthorized versions, including in two unlikely places. One was on Time's website -- which is owned by Time Warner, a major media competitor to NBCUniversal. Time Warner also was a backer of SOPA/PIPA. Perhaps it should be careful about posting unauthorized versions of competitors' TV shows on its own site...

But, even more interesting? Sullivan found an unauthorized copy at iVillage -- a site owned by NBCUniversal: Yup. That embed at the bottom? Unauthorized version uploaded to YouTube. Posted on an NBCUniversal site... because NBCUniversal won't post it itself.

Former Las Vegas Journal Review publisher and Stephens Media CEO Sherman Frederick was the main champion behind Righthaven. Early on he was the one who explained (in bizarre, nonsensical terms) why the LVRJ was funding and supporting Righthaven, and mocked those who pointed out the ridiculousness of his position. Part of his reasoning was that putting copyright infringing content on your website or blog is absolutely no different than stealing the Corvette out of his driveway. Even if we ignore how this is completely wrong (someone copying content doesn't remove that content from his site, and he still has the content, etc.) and grant him that premise, it seems rather odd that Frederick himself has now been caught posting infringing material to his own blog.

Now, it's probably worth mentioning that poor Mr. Frederick lost his job right after the election, but he's still a columnist for the LVRJ. One of our readers, Joseph, pointed out that one of Mr. Frederick's recent blog posts was a short one about how Saturday Night Live had done a skit about the TSA patdowns, and he embedded it in his blog post. Except, he apparently chose an infringing one from YouTube, rather than the legit version from Hulu. Oops. NBC has taken down that video, so now Frederick's blog post simply shows this: In case you can't see it, the video box says: "This video contains content from NBC Universal, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Of course, note that NBC Universal chose to just take the content down -- something that Righthaven never gives anyone the opportunity to do. But, more importantly, I'm wondering if Mr. Frederick can explain why he stole NBC's Corvette?

We've been talking a lot about how social mores can often deal with "copying" situations better than any legal claim could, and in particular have talked about it in the context of comedians, where jokes are not considered copyrightable. However, copying does have costs, especially when people call you out. Witness the "dispute" over whether or not Saturday Night Live "copied" a sketch from Adult Swim, both of which are called "Tiny Hats."

Honestly, the claims of copying seem a bit overblown. While both are called "Tiny Hats" and both do involve characters wearing a tiny hat, that's about as far as the similarities go. The overall concepts beyond that are pretty different. However, apparently, it's created a big stink online, with the comedians behind the Adult Swim version "calling out" SNL. However, they don't seem to have any interest in going legal (not that they could) and later admitted that inspiration comes from all over:

He says he's not particularly angry, and thinks it could have just been coincidence, as Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Andy Samberg, among other "SNL" cast members, have appeared on "Adult Swim."

"We understand that we've created something that a lot of people in comedy watch and like, and influences are totally fine," he says. "We draw influences from people all the time."

He goes on, "I don't want to start a big thing here. But it'll be interesting to see what the web does with this."

And, indeed, that last line is the key: there are social costs if what you're doing is seen as being too close. However, I'll let you be the judge of whether or not these skits are too close (and, um, whether or not either one is actually funny):