So, one of the last portals anywhere for garnering new Daria fans is shut down. The show is no longer on line at YouTube. All of the fan-contributed seven-minute portions of episodes have been removed, both in English and in French. (Including the thousands of user comments. Fortunately, Cinc saved a few of them for your pleasure.)

Several fan creations from S.C., Eccles, a “release the DVDs” partisan, and others have also been removed. (Martin Pollard has said he’ll host multiple versions of such videos at Outpost Daria.)

Viacom couldn’t come to an agreement to share revenue with YouTube, as it had with the video division of parent Google. (Some Daria episodes, in single pieces, are still available at Google Video.)

It was inevitable, amigos. YouTube is too visible, and is too widely decried for building a content base upon copyright infringement, to have had the party last forever.

(I do get perplexed about all this talk of “copyright” by the legal suits, though, when a piece such as S.C.’s voice-enriched video is at issue. What’s being infringed, if anything, in all such fanworks are trademarks, not copyrights. “A Little Knowledge” used an original script, and took the character and setting names and designs from Daria. ... Ah, but I digress.)

What seems even more evident these days is that Viacom and MTV have pushed Daria further to the back DVD burner. Yes, the music clearances are a royal pain. Freaks and Geeks managed a full release, though, all songs intact, partly by the rights holder outsourcing the clearance grunt work.

And now, with consumer broadband creating new and viable distribution channels, they’re being remarkably unimaginative in what they put forward. Take a look, if you want to bother, at the new Viacom initiative for offering video downloads through Wal-Mart.

A more detailed report notes how constricted this will be:

[...] all downloads will be WMV [Windows Media Player files] with Windows Media DRM [“digital rights management,” copy-restriction techniques]. You can burn them for backup, but they’ll only work on a single PC, with an option to be moved to “three compatible portable devices.”

Only marginally more usable, and backup-capable, than Apple’s iTunes, in other words. Steve Jobs has already ably punched holes in the case for DRM restrictions on music. When will someone make the connection for video, as well?

This copy-restriction merde is really only to cover their legal backsides, in the long run. Every DRM scheme is or will be broken. DVDs, for a decade now. The high-definition HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc schemes, as of last month. Content will find its way to users, sooner or later.

Where the DRM gatekeeping comes in is to give some legal cover for the studios to prosecute and sue large-scale infringers, or large and inviting targets such as YouTube. They make an effort to erect digital gates. Breaking them becomes a federal felony, under the DMCA. This can be used to selectively smash anyone they choose.

Anyway, the Wal-Mart scheme is full of computer-clogging DRM, whether or not you have the new Hungry-Man portion of it dished out by Windows Vista.

It’s also not aimed at the geeks — face it, for many of us, that’s what we are — who have taken up Daria and other iconoclastic TV pleasures. You can only use the security nightmare of Internet Explorer to make downloads, not Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, or anything reasonably sane.

Here’s the relevant bit of puffery at Wal-Mart’s site for this still-in-beta-test service:

MTV needs no introduction. As the epicenter for anything and everything music and pop culture, MTV has produced more groundbreaking programming — like Beavis & Butthead [sic] and Jackass — than any other cable network.

In your dreams, guys. Not for over a decade has this even come close to possibly being true.

And their “groundbreaking” selection for download? Andy Milonakis, Beavis & Butthead: The Mike Judge Collection, Jackass, Laguna Beach, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Punk’d, and Two-A-Days.

You know what’s missing here. Someone at Viacom has to know what's missing — they pulled it off of YouTube, after all. Who among them is going to do something about it? Is anybody there? Does anybody care? I'm about ready to give up.

(Find out ten more good reasons for why these downloads bite the big one.)

Labels: Downloads, DVDs