The YouTube Anime Crisis

[Uncle]

TL;DR: Japan has figured out how to do international SLAPP suits to legally destroy any YouTube channel that has ever featured clips from an anime or other Japanese media

 

[chronovore]

So that's the only video on his channel, and his Twitter doesn't really posit what he'd been doing.
I've seen heaps of channels which just host seasons of anime with Indonesian or Vietnamese fan subtitling on them. That would also count as "anime youtube," buy my impression is that this NZ bloke was claiming fair use?
What was this guy actually doing with anime? Was it a criticism or insight channel, or just hosting pirated videos?

[Uncle]

So that's the only video on his channel, and his Twitter doesn't really posit what he'd been doing.
I've seen heaps of channels which just host seasons of anime with Indonesian or Vietnamese fan subtitling on them. That would also count as "anime youtube," buy my impression is that this NZ bloke was claiming fair use?
What was this guy actually doing with anime? Was it a criticism or insight channel, or just hosting pirated videos?

the way he describes it briefly in the video, it sounds like ordinary fair use mockery along the lines of yugioh abridged

at 1:00 he says he was trying to make it as transformative/fair use as possible with short clips and voiceover, might be comparable to what redlettermedia does but for anime

[benjipwns]

There's a lot of obvious copyright violations on YouTube but companies do sometimes get into a weird situation where they'll ignore all those and then start striking legitimate fair use examples. But then I've also seen quite a few channels which are blatantly violating fair use guidelines and basically just uploading major chunks of stuff and applying "commentary" so they can claim fair use. My experience has been mostly with movies like someone will upload two plus hours of a movie in chunks to "illustrate" certain things but like dude, you're just putting the movie up. Yeah, it's great that if I want to link to a fight scene or something I can just do it and personally I think the companies should put these up themselves but we all totally know what we're doing here.

I have a bunch of short clips from various TV shows on my YouTube account, like 30 seconds or so mostly, technically I could contest them as fair use as short clips for illustration purposes can be allowable under US law but I've never been copyright struck once. What NBCUniversal did was simply claim the videos as their own for monetization. (The other corporations have not bothered at all.) It's a bit funny because instead of NBC uploading a quality source of Ron Swanson ordering in a diner to their own Parks and Recreation accounts they just left my million plus views 360p version as the major one on YouTube and it's been used/linked in major media articles too. I can't monetize these but I don't monetize anything on YouTube anyway so it doesn't really bother me even if they blocked my entire account from monetization which nobody has yet. In theory, TNT could because I've uploaded the 2000 NBA Draft (well, part of it) in ten minute or so chunks and that's their and the NBA's copyright and it's totally not fair use even for educational purposes but also it's the 2000 NBA Draft and nobody actually cares.

I know one of the recent controversies on Twitch was copyright strikes against people who just watch things on stream. Which is like the entire thing apparently, it's just the streamer sitting there watching anime or whatever and occasionally commentating and reading chat. I guess somebody was going through and striking these all down and the response was all STREAMERS RISE UP and some companies backed off.

I'm rambling but some of this stuff is kinda interesting to explore. Especially if you came up through the Napster era and it seemed like the companies were just going to totally annihilate the internet in order to defend their copyrights from the slightest infringement.

[chronovore]

Yeah, Napster was interesting. I found so many new bands through it, which I then went out and purchased more of those bands' music.

I recall when Pandora launched, and it was a year and a half of absolute bliss for me. I loved finding the new music and exploring in it. Then the RIAA and others lobbied for worst-case broadcast lawmaking AND bumped the streaming costs for internet to a degree that just about killed any independent, nascent, internet radio efforts. Meanwhile Last.fm (barf) was purchased by I think CBS and, UNFUCKINGSURPRISINGLY, had zero issues with international broadcast rights.

So, yeah, this was never about protecting their copyright so much as defending the status quo and limiting anyone else's new take on finding and accessing new music. Absolute territorialism at the pointy end of the sword of the law.