By now, you're likely familiar with the festival of unintentional hilarity that is the National Organization for Marriage (or NOM). But in case you're not up to speed, here's the story. There are a bunch of people for whom everything and everyone they ever loved or held dear was ruined, utterly and forever, because of gay marriage.
So, they launched a campaign against gay marriage, and made some commercials about chasing tornadoes, and rainbow coalitions, and gay thunder. And mostly, people laughed, because WTF? Well, as it turns out, whatever remained in these peoples' lives, spared from ruin by all the gay marriage, ended up getting ruined by leaked videos of the terrible actors giving terrible auditions for their terrible commercial. So, naturally, NOM is now against anyone seeing those audition videos, ever, and has launched a campaign against them, as well.
Last week, the Washington City Paper's Amanda Hess reported that NOM was going hard at removing their audition videos from YouTube in a desperate attempt to keep them from going viral, and Wired's Threat Level blog detailed what was being done to thwart the thwarting:
The audition videos, uncovered by the Human Rights Campaign, seem too good to be true. But NOM has helpfully authenticated them by sending DMCA notices to YouTube to get them pulled down. Vimeo.com hosted the banned videos for a while, but now also appears to have folded like an umbrella.
So internet rebels are saving the videos with keepvid.com, and then uploading them back to YouTube when they're pulled.
Now, NOM is upping the ante by pulling down OTHER PEOPLE'S content from YouTube, specifically, a clip from The Rachel Maddow Show that discusses the audition videos. From Threat Level:
The clip was previous available on YouTube, but now the page says "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by National Organization for Marriage."
MSNBC, of course, would have been well within its rights to demand the clip be removed. But NOM asserting a copyright interest to have a critical newscast scrubbed from the net? That sets an extraordinary precedent.
Anyway, that clip is still available on MSNBC, and now it's available here, as well! (NOM segment begins at 2:15)
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
And here's a clip of Rachel Maddow talking about having the show's clips removed:
MADDOW: Come now, anti-gay marriage people! I know your campaign is about how we should all be scared of gay marriage. But now you're scared of people talking about your stance on it?
And you can still see the audition videos and the NOM actors' struggles to pronounce the word "coalition," right here.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]