Will Viacom nuke the YouTube clip of CBS' Lara Logan?

CBS' Lara Logan 
(Joe Corrigan / Getty Images)

From the Digg files: In the "Daily Show" clip below, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan says she'd "blow [her] brains out" if all she had to watch was the U.S. media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication being that this nation's war coverage is highly whitewashed.

Viacom, which has a $1B lawsuit against YouTube, is -- not surprisingly -- one of the top 5 takers-down (at least recently) of unlicensed clips from the site.  Whether they knock off this clip will be an interesting test of Viacom's tolerance for news-related use of their footage. I'm no fair use expert, but I think a length of 1:42 is riding the perimeter of what's acceptable for an excerpt of copyrighted content, so there's probably some gray area about whether this is actually a fair usage.

The poster, FreePress.net, has the licensed (Comedy Central) version embedded in their own story about Logan's appearance, but they clearly wanted to give this powerful clip more exposure. And that means YouTube.

I for one was struck by Logan's candor. What she says about the sanitizing of war coverage borders on media sacrilege. You rarely hear that kind of opinion from a major media representative, let alone on a major television station. Impressive.

Comments

[Dex]

Lara's got it 100% right!!!! I feel her passion, I've lived her passion. This country's press sucks!

D