Thursday, June 12, 2008

YouTomb

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm. Who is behind YouTomb? YouTomb was built by MIT Free Culture, a student organization at MIT. Active Free Culture chapters exist at many schools and universities; they work together to promote open access to knowledge and culture.
What's recently been taken down?
John Lennon's #9 Dream, which had originally been posted on September 2, 2006, and was taken down today.


Gee, do you think today's move has anything to do with pique over the decision rejecting Yoko Ono's motion for a preliminary injunction and allowing Expelled to be distributed with the 15 seconds of "Imagine" remaining?