It's been the punchline in thousands of internet pranks, but no more - the original 'RickRoll'D' video of Rick Astley's 80s hit Never Gonna Give You Up has mysteriously vanished from YouTube.
The video, which should have been viewable here, has been taken down, replaced simply with the text: 'This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.'
Rickrolling - in which unwary web users are tricked into clicking a link to the video for the ginger crooner's Never Gonna Give You Up, thinking it's something else - has been a running joke for several years now, and has given Astley an unexpected return to fame.
While the original one has gone, other copies of the video are still live on YouTube - which makes it puzzling why the main video, which had over 30 million (mostly inadvertent) views, would have been removed.
It's not clear exactly when the video vanished, but the Astley-shaped hole in the internet was spotted by the Neowin blog, and Spanish-language blog Geekeados, earlier today.
Granted, it's an unauthorised version of a copyrighted video, but it's not like the copyright violation has only just come to the attention of Pete Waterman Entertainment and RCA Records, the labels behind the track.
Indeed, Astley himself wrote a piece for Time magazine last year thanking moot, the founder of the 4chan messageboards where Rickrolling originated, for his part in giving the song a new lease of life.
And YouTube themselves enthusiastically embraced Rickrolling, redirecting every video on their front page to the original Rickroll video as an April Fools Day prank in 2008.
So why has it been taken down? An overzealous copyright lawyer who didn't understand its significance? An escalation of the long-simmering battle between music labels and YouTube (RCA is part of the Sony Music group)? A technical glitch? Whatever the reason, there's now thousands upon thousands of links out there on the web that, in addition to not pointing to the thing they claimed to, now don't point to anything at all.
25.02.2010 - UPDATE - It's back !!!!
Once folks started noticing that the video had been removed from YouTube, they responded with mixed reactions. Twitter exploded with angry messages from users wondering why YouTube would take the video down now, months after the Rickrolling craze lost steam. Others were happy to see it go, unwittingly telling the world that they were probably victims of the gag on more than one occasion.
But just when many of us lost hope that Rickrolling would ever return, Google issued a statement saying that it had mistakenly removed the video after some YouTube users flagged it as spam. The company immediately placed the video back on its site, which means Rickrolling lives on -- both in the hearts of Web users and on YouTube. Phew.
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