YouTomb Tracks Video Takedowns

YouTomb is a new service that monitors and tracks videos being taken down off YouTube because of copyright violations. The cleverly named site that was created by the MIT student organization MIT Free Culture scans YouTube to see both who issued a copyright violation complaint, and how long the video in question was up before it was taken down.

You can’t watch the offending videos on YouTomb, just see the stats and screen shots of them. For instance, you can see that Univision asked to have a Selena Interview on Cristina video removed after it had been up for 664 days and received 510,862 plays.

According to its stats page:

YouTomb is currently monitoring 223,109 videos, and has identified 4,395 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 13,348 videos taken down for other reasons.

The project was started after YouTube announced it would start automatically filtering content to discover copyright-violating content. This automated process isn’t flawless; in some cases fair-use and other innocent videos have been erroneously taken down. YouTomb hopes that by collecting this data they can educate people about copyright, and help innocent victims of takedown notices.

As you’d expect, big media companies are making the most of the requests, with familiar names like Viacom, Warner Bros. and the World Wrestling Federation among the top issuers.

Tips of the hat to Google Systems Blog and TechCrunch.