Nothing spoils the fun like passing along a funny link to a friend and finding out it’s been taken down. Like the other day, when I passed along a link from iFilm.com of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog interviewing Michael Jackson supporters outside the trial of the King of Poop (whoops, typo!). On Monday, when I first saw it on iFilm, I was treated to 10 minutes of hilarity all for the price of watching a short Microsoft ad leading into the clip. By Tuesday, when I got around to passing it on, the clip had been taken down, and replaced with this message: “iFilm has complied with a request by NBC that we do not show this clip.” While not exactly surprising—you can practically hear the lawyers threatening each other in the background—it also seems short-sighted on NBC’s part to not actively court further distribution of its content, particularly when the network is in the ratings dumpster. (Not to single out NBC necessarily—all of the big media companies do the same thing under the same circumstances.) You can see a severely edited version of Triumph’s interviews at NBC.com (click here and look for the “Triumph” link on the right), but it just ain’t the same.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor