When YouTube videos are removed by the site’s administrators—in many cases the pulled videos allegedly violate copyright—they vanish without a trace. YouTube officials erase all data about such videos, including the title, author, and how many times the video had been viewed.
A new Web site by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is preserving information about removed videos, and analyzing what kinds of clips are taken down. It’s called YouTomb, and it is tracking more than 220,000 videos that might be removed in the future. Since the project started a few weeks ago, it has detected more than 18,000 yanked videos.
The site does not allow users to see the videos themselves. But the students, who are members of a student group called MIT Free Culture, hope that the data about the videos could be helpful to researchers.—Jeffrey R. Young
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