Copyrighted videos still on YouTube after lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Stephen Colbert is gone, but Jon Stewart is still on. "South Park" is out, but "Adult Swim" is still in.

Viacom Inc. (VIAb.N) sued Google Inc. (GOOG.O) for more than $1 billion (518 million pounds) on Tuesday over alleged copyright violations by its YouTube video unit. Viacom has succeeded in winning the deletion of some of its content, but many popular clips are still easily available.

That fact underscored the challenges in policing one of the Internet's most popular sites, where content is supplied by an army of fans eager to share that hilarious bit from last week's "Saturday Night Live" or "Family Guy."

Many popular clips on YouTube have come from shows that air on Viacom's family of television stations, which include Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV.

Viacom said nearly 160,000 unauthorised clips had been uploaded onto YouTube and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

YouTube's video swappers have poached particularly heavily from Comedy Central, thanks to programs such as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "South Park" and "Robot Chicken," which all feature bite-sized skits that lend themselves easily to sharing over the Web.

Other shows appearing regularly on YouTube include NBC's long-running comedy sketch show "Saturday Night Live" and "Family Guy," an over-the-top animated comedy that airs on News Corp.'s NWSa.N Fox network.

Calls to pull videos from YouTube are reminiscent of the music industry's largely unsuccessful attempts to stamp out peer-to-peer song sharing services. If a video is deleted, the person who posted it or copied it can make a few changes to the file and repost it.

On Tuesday afternoon, a search on YouTube for "daily show" turned up 2,800 clips, but only a handful actually featured Stewart's program, with the rest being commentaries or unrelated videos using those keywords to lure viewers.