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.

These videos are not available for viewing/downloading, thumbs only. Once again, this is simply a research project that seeks to find out more details about how YouTube locates and takes down videos accused of copyright violation.

However, it’s quite interesting what kind of movies people are submitting…