CBS suspended further copyright takedown notices over Stephen Colbert's Only in Monroe return after unofficial uploads had already outrun the official channel. That is the next act in the story this paper kept inside rights and distribution, when it said Colbert's takedowns were enforcement before censorship and that official YouTube timing had become late night's platform problem.

Yahoo's Mediaite republication says several clips and full uploads had hundreds of thousands of views before Colbert launched an official YouTube channel for the episode. One unofficial upload by The Desk had more than 620,000 views by Monday, the report says, while CBS described the takedowns as standard copyright practice. [1]

The useful sentence is CBS's own: the episode was financed and produced by CBS Studios, posted with Monroe Community Media and The Late Show channels, and would get a waiver from further enforcement "until additional review." [1]

X can call that a speech win. The record says something narrower and more useful. A rights holder paid for the show, enforced late, paused after backlash, and left the audience surface to whoever uploaded first.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin