14 DAY TRIAL // For a brief period of time, the web was shaken by the news that one of the most popular Internet memes in Internet meme history, the Rickroll, was to be no more, as YouTube pulled down the original Rickroll video. Thankfully, it was all just a big misunderstanding and the video has now been restored and is ready to punk unsuspecting web surfers once again.
Sometime yesterday, people started noticing that the copy of Rick Astley’s video "Never Gonna Give You Up" that started the whole phenomenon was no longer accessible and visitors were greeted with the message, "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."
Obviously, the video was an unauthorized copy, so many were quick to assume that the 'copyright police' had finally caught up with the popular meme. Observing YouTube users would know, though, that, if that had been the case, the site would have had a message specifically indicating that the video had been taken down due to a copyright-infringement notice.
This wasn't the case, YouTube had only gotten a number of complaints from its users through the flagging system prompting the site to take down the video. But after everyone started complaining about the move, YouTube realized the mistake and restored the video to its original glory.
"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," a YouTube representative told Mashable on the matter.
The Rickroll has its origins on the 4chan forums, like many great Internet memes before and since, and it boils down to tricking someone into following a link and unknowingly landing on the video's YouTube page. There are perhaps thousands of copies of the video on YouTube, but this one used from the start has raked up 30 million views so far and, with it being taken down, countless links had become useless. But all is well now, the video is in its rightful place waiting for new 'victims' to stumble on.