Ousted YouTube videos find home in project

It’s not the end of the road for videos YouTube administrators remove from the site.

Since the Students for Free Culture chapter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created YouTomb, the videos are raised from the grave.

According to YouTomb’s Web site, the group tracks videos that have been removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement. It also records who sent in a complaint and how long the complaint stood before YouTube took the video off its site. The experiment is a research project that attempts to “identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.”

The project began when YouTube decided to make more stringent policies against allowing copyrighted material on its site, and announced its intention to use a filter that would scan uploaded videos (and audio) to detect matches with copyrighted videos, according to YouTomb.

Although visitors to the site cannot view the videos, they can look at the research collected from the group and see what videos were removed from YouTube, who asked for their removal, how long the video remained on the site and how long ago the video was taken down. So far, YouTomb has tracked more than 4,000 videos that were taken down due to copyright infringement, and another 13,350 that were removed for additional reasons.