Two weeks ago Moveon.org asked Google to ban advertisements which used the terms "MoveOn" and "Moveon.org" to criticize Moveon.org, claiming copyright infringement. Moveon.org was mobilizing a campaign to unseat Republican congresswoman Susan Collins, and her campaign manager placed the ads on Google. And guess what? Google owns YouTube!

Looks like "copyright claims" are the latest censorship tool, following on attempts to squelch books on terrorist financing by "libel tourism."

But Moveon.org cried foul when Viacom sued for "copyright infringement" in March after

Move-On.org and entertainment distributor Brave New Films posted a video called "Stop the Falsiness" on YouTube. They created the short video to promote the appearance of one of MoveOn.org's organizers on the satirical Comedy Central program "The Colbert Report." MoveOn.org included snippets from "The Colbert Report" in its video to skewer what it sees as the conservative bent of the Fox News Channel, which host Stephen Colbert lampoons on his nightly show.

But this parody of a parody took an odd twist on March 13. Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube and its parent, Google, charging that more than 160,000 clips posted on the site violate copyright laws. Many of the clips included material from "The Colbert Report" and other Comedy Central programming owned by Viacom International. YouTube complied with the request, removing tens of thousands of videos. Caught up in the "Colbert" sweep was the "Stop the Falsiness" video.

But MoveOn.org and video co-creator Brave New Films alleged in a federal lawsuit filed late Wednesday that the video is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, because it does more than post snippets from a television program: It "mashes them up" into something new, mixing original content with copyrighted material from "The Colbert Report."

Even Viacom agreed with that contention Thursday -- nudged by a quick-strike media blitz by MoveOn.org and the federal lawsuit it left on Viacom's doorstep.

The controversy led to this plaintive lament:

The MoveOn.org Civic Action campaign's spokesman Adam Green said he worries about how YouTube users, who don't have the resources and media-savvy of his 3.2 million-member organization, are going to fight a media behemoth that orders the removal of legally produced video.

Shoe. Foot. Other.

Jackie Danicki says:

I know personally of many, many companies that are spending millions of dollars every month on Google and cannot get the search giant to enforce its trademark policy on their behalf.

Patrick Ruffini has an excellent post on the possible ramifications of this approach in chilling political criticism.

. . . are now conceding that an organization like MoveOn is above criticism in the Web’s #1 advertising medium because they happen to be an organization with a trademark, rather than just an elected official or a party?

And more disturbingly, do politicians just trademark their name to (among other things) protect themselves from criticism on Google’s expanding ad network? If so, that’s a pretty severe distortion of the open, participatory online culture that Google claims to be fighting for. Major organizations and political rock stars with trademarks would be automatically immune. Everyone else, not so much.

That’s not as far off as you think. Hillary Clinton successfully sued for the rights to HillaryClinton.com citing the trademark rights to her name. Could she now wield that newfangled right to thwart paid online advertising against her?