And so it begins: Last night, at the request of a Japanese entertainment-industry consortium, YouTube pulled 29,549 videos from its site. This includes music videos, TV shows, and presumably, lots of footage of adorably fuzzy little animals. We checked at one of our favorite sites, TV In Japan, and indeed, a few of their music-video clips have already been pulled–though this footage of a big-band tribute to the Mario Brothers is, thankfully, still intact.

So don’t just sit there! The end is nigh, and if you want to preserve your favorite YouTube clips, you’d better get PodTube TubeSock and start ripping. Though actually, you probably can do that while still just sitting there.

YouTube deletes 30,000 files after Japanese group complains about copyright infringement [IHT]