Although YouTube yanked tons of Daily Show and Colbert Report clips a few days ago at Viacom’s stern behest, well, it looks like all those clips are safe … for now, at any rate. With the news popping up on that bulwak of reporting, Eonline, and according to an article by AdWeek, execs say:

“Like our peers in the media industry, we are focused on finding the right business model for professionally created content to be legally distributed on the Internet,” the Viacom rep said. “We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we’re interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences.”

What’s interesting is that not only is YouTube permitting these Comedy Central shows (and more, under Viacom), they are actively UN-blocking ones that were previously not quite copyright kosher.

Although Viacom doens’t have the same partnership deals that BMG, Sony and host of others arranged before YouTube was bought by Google, it looks like they’re certainly jockeying for the same benefits.

And if it goes through, unlike those other media companies (as far as I know), Viacom will be actively spreading its content across multiple platforms — some, such as YouTube, it has little control over. It already has a few multimedia properties, such as Comedy Central’s Motherload, which already streams regular clips of Comedy Central related stuff — but doesn’t have the same flexibility as YouTube (able to include it in your blog and so on).

Also of note the phrase “protect our talented artists” — would be incongruent if Mark Cuban’s “insider post” were true; which means that either Viacom won’t be protecting their artists financially (frozen out, because it wouldn’t be a licensing agreement, but an “investment”), or, perhaps the insider’s opinion is just plain wrong.

More to come as the situation matures — but it looks like YouTube will likely not go the way of Napster after all. One wonders, however, in light of Brightcove et al, whether or not YouTube can sort out its issues fast enough, so it can still have an impact.