C-Span is 0wn1ng the rights to Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Dinner speech, claiming the video clips posted on YouTube and ifilm.com are violating its copyright. Not to mention C-Span is now selling its own version of the clip on its website. (C-Span, we should remind you, is a not-for-profit television venture.)

Sound errily familiar? Of course it does.

It was just a few weeks ago that NBC demanded the video sharing sites take down its Saturday Night Live digital shorts featuring castmember Andy Samberg and Natalie Portman. Like those SNL clips, Colbert's popular diatribe against President Bush (2.7 million YouTube viewings in the first 48 hours) was the most buzzworthy event to come out of the public TV network — with Al Franken sparring with Bill O'Reilly on C-Span's Book TV being the only close rival. Now "corporate" is trying to control the best unintentional viral marketing gimmick to come out of that ignored section of the dial.

We haven't checked in with Colbert, so we can't gauge his reaction. But when we ran into Samberg last week at Marquee (he was hanging with Amy Poehler at at a Death Cab For Cutie video release party), we asked him about NBC's course of action against YouTube. "I was pissed," Samberg told us, but "they [NBC] had the legal right to do it." But as Kevin Federline showed us with music, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

(NB: In our dutiful research for this item, we tried loading the clip of Colbert on C-Span.org. It didn't work.)

A Comedian's Riff on Bush Prompts an E-Spat [Noam Cohen, NYT]
Related: Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Dinner Assault