Even casual YouTube users have no doubt come across video clips that the company has taken down for one reason or another, but a new service gives viewers at least a chance to see the offending content. Delutube, as its name implies, can serve up some video clips even after YouTube has purged them.

Looking through a selection of random clips on Delutube provides insight into YouTube's takedown practices. A large number of the clips contain copyrighted music, though the video is typically of high school girls trying to look like strippers as hip-hop plays in the background. (Note that not all of these clips may be work-safe.)

Delutube allows visitors to enter the video ID (pulled from the end of the YouTube URL) of a deleted clip, then attempts to retrieve the clip from YouTube's system. Clips are not apparently deleted from YouTube's database at the moment they are taken down (or they at least persist in YouTube's cache before being cleared), allowing Delutube a chance of retrieving them. The site also allows for the easy downloading of clips.

The service, and others like it, could make YouTube's network an easy way to share and download even illicit video files that will quickly be pulled from the public portion of the site. It's also the sort of thing likely to cause even more angst among content owners, especially if visitors can still retrieve clips that have been the target of DMCA takedown notices.

Delutube isn't the only service that can do such a thing, of course, but it's possibly the most ironic; the site makes money serving Google ads. The creation of these services shows how much demand exists for this sort of material, and what a hard time content owners have controlling it. For them, such sites are one more frustrating roadblock on the way to exerting control of songs and video clips on the Internet.

Are such sites legal? It's hard to say. The clips all come from YouTube's servers, and many of them don't appear to infringe anyone's copyright (these are generally removed due to depictions of drunken behavior or inappropriate sexual content). Still, expect some form of legal action against the services if they become a big-enough nuisance to content owners or make YouTube's own negotiations with copyright holders more difficult.