The original Rickroll video – essentially Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up – was removed by YouTube in a move which upset everyone who has ever pulled a Rickroll on anyone. But it was a mistake, a glaring Terms Of Use violation screw-up. Thank God for that.
Rickrolling Phenomenon
Any regular Web user will no doubt be aware of the phenomenon that is Rickrolling. In fact, everyone has probably been Rickrolled on more than one occasion.
Rickrolling began on the 4Chan message board back in 2007 but soon spread to the rest of the Web. In essence, you post a link to something you describe as interesting, cool, or must-see, when in fact the link leads to the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, a Rick Astley track that sums up 1980s cheese in one three-minute package.
Rickrolling became so big that Google used it as one of its April Fool’s Day pranks in 2008, linking all the featured videos on YouTube’s front page to the Rickroll video. And then Rick Astley himself turned up during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November of that year lip-syncing the lyrics to the millions of people watching at home.
Although according to Pete Waterman, the song still didn’t make a fortune, despite its new-found fame.
Original Video Removed
As first noticed by Neowin, the original Rickroll video, which has been up since May 2007, disappeared on Wednesday morning, with a “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation” message displayed instead.
A collective gasp then went round the blogosphere and social networking sites as people reacted to the news. Could the art of Rickrolling really have been killed off? And why, after nearly three years on the site, had the video now been pulled?
Original Video Restored
It was a mistake, pure and simple, with YouTube spokesperson issuing the following statement while restoring the video to its former glory.
“With 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, we count on our community members to know our Community Guidelines and to flag content they believe violates them. We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour. We also have a team that is dedicated to identifying and removing spam from YouTube.”
“Occasionally, an account flagged by users or identified by our spam team is mistakenly taken down. When this is brought to our attention, we move quickly to take appropriate action, including restoring videos that had been mistakenly removed and channels that have been mistakenly suspended.”
Conclusions
After the absurd decision by Italy to convict three Google executives over a UGC video which had nothing to do with them, maybe YouTube is being a little overcautious and overzealous in its take-downs at the moment.
Whether that’s the case or not, I’m glad the Rickroll video is back. It’s one of those Web phenomenons that is sure to fall in and out of favor but never truly disappear. Unless YouTube removes it again, and for good next time.
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