When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube were on the stage at D, they responded to a question on copyrights and their relationship with the content owners by repeating the oft-told story about how they will often get a video uploaded by a publicity department and then some time later a cease-and-desist letter from the same company's legal department. Sure enough, we saw that process in action when Viacom President and CEO, Philippe Dauman took the stage. His talk was preceded by a hilarious video from Viacom talent Stephen Colbert. According to D organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Dauman gave them permission to post the video on their web site. However, by the time we came back from the break, Walt and Kara announced that the Viacom lawyers had already called and asked them to take it down.
UPDATE: Kara and Walt said it was all a misunderstanding. The video is back.
