YouTube removing public domain cartoons

I alluded to the fact that YouTube was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this recent post, but the information I had was coming from unknown commenters on John K's blog, so I decided to do the unthinkable and not take their word as gospel. However, a lot of people who actually work in the industry, such as Amid Amidi, have also echoed those same sentiments, and it seems that, yes, YouTube, in its quest to protect copyright holders, has also been deleting cartoons that entered the public domain many years ago and should be freely distributed to the masses by any means people see fit. I first began to suspect many of those old Warner Bros. shorts were public domain when someone mentioned "Yankee Doodle Daffy" had been taken off the site, a cartoon I bought as a "public domain" video almost a decade ago. Amid has a great post about this over on Cartoon Brew, with links to other great articles on the subject. I think whether or not YouTube should be showing copyrighted material is up for debate, but to also deny fans access to perfectly legitimate classic cartoons is not going to bode well for the site. People are angry, and rightfully so.