Please don’t sue us – An open letter to Tony Fox, PR rep for Viacom

Dear Mr. Fox:

My name is DB Ferguson, and I run NoFactZone.net, a blog which many consider to be the best independent Stephen Colbert fan site on the web. We’ve been blogging about Stephen Colbert since July 17, 2006, so close to 4 years. We have an all-volunteer staff of 13 Completists, who blog 7 days a week to bring the Colbert Nation the most up to date news about Stephen Colbert and the ‘Colbert Report’. We receive on average over 60,000 unique visits a month and over 100,000 page views. We’ve had over 2.5 million unique hits over the course of our blog, and every one of those hits was free to readers and positively biased towards Stephen Colbert.

Before I go any further, I would like to praise the access to videos that you have given through ColbertNation.com. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, and I remember the horrid shape of the official ‘Colbert Nation’ site and the videos for the first couple of years of the show. I remember struggling to even watch a video, and there was no way that a video was getting embedded. We at No Fact Zone mostly linked to YouTube videos, until they were taken down, not because we wanted to make money off of the videos, but because we wanted to share the greatness that is Stephen Colbert with anyone who would listen. In the fall of 2008, ColbertNation.com made a game changing move. They started streaming both full videos as well as embeddable clips. And the way that the new media department tagged the videos and the way that the videos were searchable was so amazingly wonderful. I still visit the official ‘Colbert Nation’ site almost every day, and when I do, I almost always stop to watch a video or two. Sometimes it’s something recent, but often it’s something from the vaults, something I haven’t seen in years, but I just have a hankering to watch. I’m quite grateful for the fact that Viacom listened to their viewers and gave them access to videos. I will be the first to admit that there are processes in the video experience that should be upgraded, but all in all, it’s head and shoulders over what was being offered for a very long time.

That being said, I was a bit distressed when I read at the Hollywood Reporter that Viacom will start suing bloggers who use unauthorized clips of the ‘Daily Show’. From the tone of the interview, it sounds like this edict applies to all Comedy Central shows, including the main topic of our blog, the ‘Colbert Report’. Now, I use authorized clips of the ‘Colbert Report’ and the ‘Daily Show’, with the rare exception of fanvids (virtually all of which have been removed from the original servers and are no longer available). I do screencaps sometimes, I’ll admit to that. And we often post the videos of the shows without the embed frame, as I prefer to feature the video as large as it will go on my site. But I’m using video that streams directly from Viacom and ColbertNation.com, ads and all.

You said in your interview with the Hollywood Reporter that “My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem.” When I tell people I am the webmaster of a very popular web site, the first thing people ask is “How much money do you make?” And I can say, in all honesty, not a dime. I take pride in the fact that I do this site not because I am making money, but I do it simply for the love and the passion of blogging about a man and a show that I have grown to respect and admire. We’re more than a news site, we’re a community.

To further alleviate any concern you may have about us profiting off of Viacom’s intellectual property, let me be perfectly transparent about our finances here at No Fact Zone. Our server costs run us $129 a month. Our host graciously manages our box for free. You see that ad in the far right corner? That’s our lone ad on the site. Wanna know how much I made in February 2010 from that ad? $1.62. No, seriously. $1.62. We’ve received donations for our server, which sit in a fund that our host keeps and uses to pay our server fees. But the blogging staff doesn’t see a dime; the donations go straight to the server fees. Our staff gets no pay, no perks, nothing except the satisfaction that what we are doing is producing something we as a fan community can be proud of.

Look, I understand that you don’t want blogs profiting from your content. I know of quite a few high profile blogs that take clips and post them under their own frame. Those sites have lots of ads, and paid staff, and make lots and lots of money. I can see how that would irk you. Our site is just a simple fan blog, with some of the hardest core ‘Colbert Report’ fans on the net, whose sole mission is to praise Stephen Colbert, all glory to his name, peace be upon him. We are one shiny, happy lovefest here, a 100% biased constantly updated ad for your show that we sustain at our own expense. If you have a problem with something we’ve posted, please, shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be more than happy to take it down if you feel that somehow, for example, a screencap of Stephen Colbert in a cute outfit is going to financially hurt Viacom in some way. We want to make this work. We want to praise, and we want to blog, and we want to be a community that does not live in fear of the people who also bring us what we so very much enjoy and love.

Thank you for listening to the fans.

Sincerely,
DB Ferguson
Webmaster and founder, NoFactZone.net