• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, May 14, 2007

News Corp. reportedly is griping about clips that parody "The Simpsons" now appearing on Broadcaster.com, according to press reports.

The three clips, "If I Did It" -- named after the now-scrapped book by O.J. Simpson that News Corp. had previously agreed to publish -- "Black and White Christmas," and "Warzone," all feature the former football star as a character in the Fox series "The Simpsons," according to The Hollywood Reporter, which last night reported on the dust-up.

News Corp. reportedly is asking Broadcaster.com to remove the clips, while Broadcaster.com has taken the position that the clips are protected under the "fair use" doctrine, which generally lets people use copyrighted material for purposes of parody.

The clips apparently were developed via Broadcaster.com, which enables users to post and edit their own videos. Now they've spread beyond the site; YouTube also has versions -- some of which had been uploaded five months ago and viewed more than 20,000 times. It's unclear at this point whether News Corp. has asked YouTube to also delete the material.

This dispute is hardly the first time that a copyright owner has complained about parodies -- even though courts typically consider parodies a fair use. In fact, when groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have gotten involved in these cases, arguing that copyright law doesn't prohibit parodies, they've often been successful on the legal front.

Whether sites like YouTube will decide that it's a good business decision to carry material that their potential business partners don't like is another matter. But, no matter how tempted YouTube and other sites might be to placate big media companies, the video-sharing sites as well as the TV networks have to realize by now that there's no real way to suppress content -- especially where, as here, it arguably doesn't violate copyright laws. What's more, any attempt to suppress clips will result only in sites like YouTube losing visitors, while the videos themselves live on -- in e-mail, on smaller sites and the like.