• YouTomb: Where Videos Go to Die

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

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    Ever wonder exactly how many videos are taken down from YouTube because of copyright violations or other reasons? So did the folks at the MIT Free Culture student group. They created YouTomb to document all YouTube videos that have been taken down. It is currently tracking 177,000 videos, and counts 4,394 that have been taken down for alleged copyright violations.

    For each video taken down, YouTomb records the title, description, who uploaded it, when it was taken down, and some screen shots. You cannot watch the videos on the site. But it does document what happened to them, in case any were taken down wrongfully, in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which requires that Youtube chooses to comply with by removing any videos for which it receives a take down notice). The biggest users of the take down notice ion Youtube include TV TOKYO, Viacom, Warner Bros, and World Wrestling Entertainment.

    (via Google Operating System).

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