Update on Searchles TV & Grouper Videos

There was a lot of coverage on the cease and desist letter we received from Grouper's attorney last week including Mashable, TechCrunch, Slashdot and Digital Media Wire to name a few.

Thanks to everyone who blogged about it or took the time to comment. Most of the comments were very supportive of Searchles and others raised good questions and ideas. We think all of this dialogue is good and that Internet users, copyright holders and all the various websites that help keep people connected with the content they care about will be better served if an open dialogue takes place to find best practices rather than resorting to c&d’s which only serve to stifle innovation. Keep sharing your thoughts and ideas – we DO listen - that’s a large part of how the Searchles platform evolves.

That said, I do need to correct the record on a comment I made Friday at Techcrunch. It turns out (as Freshmaker pointed out) that when users embed Grouper videos on Searchles (using the Grouper player), if you click on the video itself, it doesn’t link back to the Grouper video page. On most other sites when you embed the same code, the links do work. We aren’t sure why yet. This was definitely not our intention.

Links through YouTube embeds on Searchles still work ok, so it isn't an issue with disallowing offsite links through Flash (a la MySpace). It looks like it's the same embed code that Grouper offers on their site so we don't know why the links don't work on Searchles. Here is an example from which I was drawing my conclusions:

http://www.searchles.com/links/show/grouper.com%2Fvideo%2Fmediadetails.aspx%3Fid%3D887772%26ml%3Do%253d7%2526fk%253dsouth%252520park%2526fx%253d%26

We are not sure if this is a problem unique to us or not, but we’re looking into it and will post an update when it’s fixed.

dumbfounder