The battle between DirecTV and Viacom has just claimed a big casualty: Online streaming episodes of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” Viacom and DirecTV have been publicly battling over DirecTV’s reluctance to pay the fees Viacom demands to carry their 26 channels.

On Tuesday evening, the satellite provider dropped Viacom channels, including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV, from their lineup.

[…] But Viacom continued to play hardball. As of Thursday, full episodes of the shows have been removed from the official “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” websites, although individual clips of the episodes are still available. The move is likely to upset viewers who do not subscribe to DirecTV, but who will still be unable to watch full episodes of their favorite shows due to the two corporations’ feud. Presumably, the suspension will not be permanent, and episodes will resume streaming online when DirecTV and Viacom reach an agreement to reinstate Viacom programming.

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read thestatement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

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