Berkman@10: YouTomb

One thing I wanted to touch base on before moving onto my conclusions from the conference: YouTomb.

On Thursday night I had the opportunity to meet with a group of people over dinner to talk about an effort coming out of MIT’s Free Culture group – their campus’ chapter of a nationwide network of students spending time exploring and acting on the issues of culture, intellectual property, and society, based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Lessig. You can (and should) read it in its entirety here. Representatives from Harvard College’s Free Culture, the founders of ROFLCon, Alex Leavitt, and Jeff Young from Chronicle.com were also at the table, and thanks again to Jeff for picking up the tab.

The discussion of the evening was YouTomb, a project dedicated to tracking YouTube DMCA takedown notices and other reasons videos on YouTube get taken down. For those unfamiliar, in order for a content provider to avoid liability for copyright infringement, the provider must appoint an agent responsible for managing infringement claims. If you see a video that infringes on your copyright, you can email this agent, and the agent will take down the video (hence the “takedown notice”). The original poster will also have a chance to refute that claim, but in practice the user isn’t always informed until well after the video is taken down, which those of us at the table feel is less in the interest of screwing the user (as I pointed out, it’s in the best interest of YouTube to have as many videos out there as possible from a business angle), and more about the ease of handing such a volume of claims.

The project aims to, at least at first, simply gather and present the data on this subject, both quantitative and qualitative. This in and of itself is no easy feat – from a quantitative angle, YouTube prohibits spiders from going through the site, which greatly inhibits efforts to index and snapshot the site at given points in time. From a qualitative angle, if a video is taken down nothing about the content of the original video remains – not the user, the title, the length, or, in some cases, even the person requesting the takedown. While the focus is certainly on copyright takedowns, the site also tracks videos taken down by terms of service violations, and tries to establish what violations occurred.

The purpose of this data collection, as the website clearly points out, is not to advocate the restoration of these videos or provide them for consumption on their site, which would most likely be illegal, but rather expose these numbers as data for others to use. Granted, most of the videos they saw taken down were blatant copyright violations and deserved the takedown they received (at least in the eyes of the law). But things are far from rosy in the takedown world. YouTube is incredibly secretive about the process by which these notices are handled, and often times the videos are taken down without chance of rebuttal. The arm of takedown often seems quite far-reaching at times, and we all had stories of how far it could go (the best was from the group presenting, recalling a time when a friend’s cell phone video of his friends and him watching the 2007 Red Sox final pitch was taken down for the less-than two seconds of baseball footage, which was completely indiscernible, and occupying only part of the screen. Nevertheless, MLB requested a takedown and YouTube executed).

The concern naturally becomes When does YouTube go too far, and will we even know if it happens? Granted, for many of the posters on YouTube this will not be an issue; even for those who do get a takedown, few will likely refute that claim. To make progress towards lifting the curtain behind the takedown process would certainly be a good thing, and I can’t wait to see good things out of YouTomb.

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