YouTomb.mit.edu - Video Takedowns Uncovered

Not surprisingly, YouTube is rife with copyright violations. This has been the subject of much ire to the big media companies, who didn’t want copies of Colbert, or Lost. floating around fancy-free on the nets. Yet, the YouTube nation persists and posts them anyways. That is, until the get taken down. So what exactly happens to those “dead” videos? Where do they all go? The graveyard of YouTube videos is precisely the subject of an MIT project cunningly named YouTomb. YouTomb tracks all those lost, dead videos and finds out what exactly happened to them, why there were taken down and when, who uploaded it in the first place, as well as a description. Screenshots included. Unfortunately, the lost videos are not up for view on the site itself, but you may be able to track with the info provided. Consider a kind of purgatory for videos that got lost a long the way.

“YouTomb is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The purpose of the project is to investigate what kind of videos are subject to take down notices due to allegations of copyright infringement with particular emphasis on those for which the takedown may be mistaken. Although our initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, we are interested in other video collections as well.”

YouTomb is an interesting project from the folks at MIT. It may not be very entertaining itself, but it is useful to see what gets taken down and why and when.

Will anything good come out of this? Is this watchdog activity going to draw the ire of some higher ups? Does this site have longevity?