The Techfiles

YouTomb, Where YouTube Videos go to Die

By Adam Myers ⋅ September 24, 2008 ⋅ Tags: copyright law, dmca, takedown notice, youtomb, youtube

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. When a user-submitted video is is suspected of copyright infringement the rights holder can submit a DMCA takedown notification that Youtube respects, generally with no questions asked. Because of the general lack of transparency shown by YouTube as to why videos seemingly come and go, the YouTomb project was conceived to further educate the public on copyright law, and as a resource for users who find their videos removed.

YouTomb does not have the resources to track every single video submitted to YouTube, instead they monitor the top videos as well as videos determined by other heuristics. YouTomb is currently monitoring 272,029 videos, and has identified 9,308 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 36,263 videos taken down for other reasons. While YouTomb does not host the pulled videos - it is against the DMCA afterall - it does provide a few snapshots of the infringing content, as well as how many viewers the video received and how long the video was live on YouTube.

The Stats page lists all the reasons a video was taken down, not surprisingly, copyright infringement leads the way. Corporate entity Viacom is the leading DMCA issuer. These types of statistics and recorded information could prove invaluable to the right type of individual.

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