NEW YORK After Viacom sent YouTube a letter last week asking the video-sharing site to remove some of its copyrighted content, the two companies appear to have reached an understanding.

The letter requested that YouTube remove some Viacom proprietary content that had been posted by users, including episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

That letter led YouTube to scramble to remove several videos over the weekend, according to officials.

Now, according to a Viacom representative, the two companies are exploring ways to ensure such problems will not be repeated. As a result, YouTube has re-posted an undisclosed number of Viacom-produced videos.

As of Tuesday, a variety of short clips from the Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, Laguna Beach and SpongeBob SquarePants could all be accessed on the site.

"Like our peers in the media industry, we are focused on finding the right business model for professionally created content to be legally distributed on the Internet," the Viacom rep said. "We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we're interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences."

As of now, Viacom has yet to enter an official licensing agreement with YouTube as have other media companies, including CBS, NBC and several top record companies.

This month, Google agreed to acquire YouTube in a deal valued at $1.65 billion [Adweek Online, Oct. 9].

An addition, Viacom demanded that they erase over 100,000 videos of anything related to them such as Nickelodeon, VH1, MTV etc. and The-N is apart of Nickelodeon.

that sucks........

but that doesn't include content from CTV. Does it?

no, but since the show is linked to Nick/The-N/MTV the vids got the boot.

grr viacom! Well...they have officially lost my support for their programs.
They had free advertising from promos and fan made videos and they pulled them because they are greedy. I can see pulling the actual shows that are posted in full from youtube ...but free advertising? What stupid person does that?

I'm not surprised by any of this.

I'm not surprised either...but I am interested to see how this is gonna work out.

i'm a little surprised. i can understand taking off the full eps, but fan vids...who cares. they haven't taken off south of nowhere yet.

actually they have... anything nick/the-n related they took off.

ya i just saw that. it's kinda sad, some of those vids were really good.

Yeah i agree, it's a bummer, that all the great vids were taken off. Also i found that a lot of the fan vids stopped me from going into degrassi withdrawl too.

lol. Yes...it improved mental health...soon that will be proven

HA HA HA HA HA......... Yes and then the company Viacom will have no choice but to let people post fan vids and promos and stuff online. They don't want to be responsible for the triggers of metal illness. It won't be good for the public and social relations sector of that company ( or whatever they call it.)