You know all those lovely clips of The Daily Show, Good Morning America, Dancing With the Stars, and American Idol that blogs have been able to publish with growing ease and selection in the past few months?

The joyride may be over.

In a dust up we kind of expected to see, and are surprised took so long to form, RedLasso (the company behind the embeddable clips) is being taken to court by NBC, CBS, and Fox for copyright violations. [Reuters] They're not so happy that their programming has been reduced to bite-size segments for anyone to watch gratis.

In the old, Web 1.0 days, television networks were happy to see their worthwhile segments posted to the web, discussed and forwarded to friends, and hopefully attracting new viewers for Nielsen to track.

Now, they've realized how valuable that content is: Viacom's Comedy Central ripped Daily Show and Colbert Report clips off sites like YouTube and now offers its own branded embeddable player; MNSBC/NBC finally got around to offering their own excellent functional video widget.

And now Hulu, the NBC-News Corp. ad-supported streaming TV show venture is reporting larger video viewing numbers than other sites streaming television programs, including the hugely popular ABC.com. [Reuters] That's, um, proof there's money to be made with online video, ya heard?

But make no mistake: While here, in 2008, the networks are furious with a service like RedLasso, the video service's model is the future, with on-demand, "cut you own" footage made available to all. So somebody snap them up already.