YouTomb: A YouTube takedown
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Some enterprising MIT students are raging against the machine. In this case, they are targeting YouTube, the video-sharing website run by Internet giant Google.
The students’ website, YouTomb, documents which videos are removed from YouTube for alleged copyright violations or other reasons, so they don’t disappear unnoticed. You can’t watch the videos on the site, but you can find out what happened to them.
YouTube takes down videos for many reasons. The one that gets the most attention: notification that a video infringes on a copyright. Large media companies such as Viacom and Warner Bros. are the most prolific takedown artists.
YouTomb’s creators said they wanted to shed light on YouTube’s practices, educate the public about copyright laws and provide resources for people who had their videos removed from YouTube. YouTube didn’t have an immediate comment.
YouTomb, first covered by the Google Operating System blog, is currently tracking 223,177 videos. Some 4,400 of those were taken down for alleged copyright violations. Right now the site focuses...
... on the most popular or widely viewed videos, but its creators hope to one day track videos that may be ‘at risk.’
YouTomb was founded by members of the MIT chapter of Free Culture, a nationwide group that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works. A key free-culture proponent is Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University professor who helped form Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the legal sharing of creative works through less-restrictive licenses. Here’s how MIT Free Culture describes the YouTomb mission:
This project does not condone or promote illegal activity. That being said, many members of Free Culture take issue with the current state of U.S. copyright and are actively seeking to reform it. While many YouTube videos that contain non-original material are blatantly violating copyright (e.g. exact rips of TV shows), many others have a more complex legal status because of the fair-use provision of copyright law. The sampling and remixing of non-original material have often led to great cultural accomplishments, so protecting this fragile aspect of copyright law is very important to us.
Four undergrads -- Greg Price, David Sheets, Quentin Smith and Dean Jansen -- built the original site. They have now been joined by many others who share their passion for making more public the reasons YouTube removes videos from its site, said Kevin Driscoll, one of the group’s members. According to the data so far, Driscoll said, it’s often unclear why exactly a video was removed. ‘Lots of stuff on YouTube is in this gray area,’ he said.
Driscoll, a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies who moonlights as a hip-hop DJ, says he became active in the free culture movement because of a disconnect between cultural practices and copyright laws. He has experienced a YouTube takedown firsthand. He used his cellphone to shoot a video, about 15 seconds long, of Boston Red Sox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon getting the final out in the 2007 World Series. YouTube removed the video at Major League Baseball’s request, Driscoll said, but later agreed to put it back up.
Emily Berger, intellectual property fellow with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the effort to hold media companies and other copyright owners accountable when they issue takedown notices.
‘Getting community involvement and getting the community paying attention to these issues is always exciting, she said. But, ‘at the end of the day, I’m not sure where this leaves us in terms of where we go from here.’
-- Jessica Guynn