A liberal group, MoveOn.org, is dropping a suit against Viacom Inc. after the company agreed to make it easier to protest the removal of Web videos parodying or critiquing programs such as “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show.”

The dispute involved a tongue-in-cheek video attacking the host of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert, as a right-wing demagogue. The short film also parodied some liberal press critics, albeit with their participation.

Soon after the video was posted on YouTube, it was removed because Viacom complained of copyright infringement. The company has acknowledged that the video should not have been removed because it qualified as a “fair use” permitted under copyright law.

Lawyers for the filmmakers said the suit was dropped after Viacom promised not to seek removal of “creative, newsworthy, or transformative” excerpts posted for noncommercial purposes.

“They’ve gone on the record about their process,” Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said.

The company also set up an email address to handle complaints of unjustified removals and said it would address those complaints within one business day. “If something is down even for a day or two, that is a big deal. This is free speech we’re talking about,” another attorney involved with the case, Anthony Falzone of Stanford Law School, said. He noted that some political parodies could lose their punch even when pulled from the Web for a short time.

A spokesman for Viacom, Jeremy Zweig, said the company simply reaffirmed procedures already in place. “We are pleased that MoveOn and EFF are recognizing the effective processes we have consistently applied since we began taking down our unauthorized content from YouTube,” he said.

Still unresolved are questions about automatic mechanisms many content-sharing sites now use to prevent posting of material that might infringe copyrights. “How do you create filters that only screen out whole episodes of ‘The Daily Show’ and not the ‘Falsiness’ video?” Ms. McSherry asked. “There’s got to be some trained human eyes somewhere in this process.”