YouTuber Has 150 Anime Reviews And 'Let's Draws' Hit With Copyright Claims All At Once
from the surprise! dept
As has been a hot topic of discussion of late, YouTube has a copyright enforcement problem on its hands. To be fair, this problem has existed for some time, but due to some recent transparency from YouTube itself over how often it receives claims and enforces them, the scale of this problem is becoming more widely known. In YouTube’s minor defense: this is difficult challenge to overcome. The platform operates internationally, which means that it often finds itself attempting to navigate the nuances of copyright laws throughout the world. Still, to say it’s not a problem would be silly. And, frankly, YouTube’s creative community is becoming more and more vocal about it.
Take Mark Fitzpatrick, for instance, the operator of the Totally Not Mark YouTube channel. Fitzpatrick releases a video a week covering mostly anime topics, primarily either reviews of anime shows or episodes, alongside some let’s draws for anime images and characters. He has had this channel for several years and has well over half a million subscribers. This is all fairly straightforward fair use stuff. And, yet, Mark was slammed with a series of copyright claims on 150 of his videos over the course of a day or so, resulting in those videos being taken offline.
YouTuber Mark Fitzpatrick of Totally Not Mark has made a name for himself with his manga and anime videos on YouTube. His reviews edit together montages from whatever he’s reviewing or critiquing as he expounds his thoughts in voice over. Mark says his use of copyright material is fair. Toei Animation, it seems, disagrees, and have filed copyright claims on 150 of his videos.
“Over the last twenty-four hours, I’ve sat back in disbelief, shock, and sorrow as my life’s work has been unfairly ripped away from me,” begins Mark in his response video to Toei and YouTube, which, as of writing, has over 400,000 views. “Two nights ago, I received an email notifying me that fifteen of my videos had been copyright claimed and block by Toei Animation,” Mark continues. “One hour later, that number rose to twenty-eight. And when I woke up this morning, it had reached a total of 150 videos that my audience can no longer see and that I can no longer monetize.” All the videos in question were either for Dragon Ball or One Piece, both of which Toei animates. Note that a handful of those videos did not feature any anime clips, but rather, were how-to-draw explainers.
As a result, something like 3 years worth of his work just went poof! Along with a significant chunk of his company’s revenue. This despite Fitzpatrick noting that Toei has actually asked him to do some work in promoting its content directly in the past!
Now, you may be asking how this happens when fair use or fair dealing is a thing. After all, Fitzpatrick operates out of Ireland, where fair dealing is part of the law. Except the claims are coming from a company based out of Japan where there is no such provision in the law and, as we’ve discussed ourselves, copyright law has morphed into an absolute restrictive monster. And Japanese law may be where YouTube’s proverbial head is at.
In his response, Mark says that he ensures that he and his employees adhere to policy regarding fair dealing and fair use as outlined by YouTube, his own country, and other countries. This maybe true; however, copyright law in Japan is…different. I’m no lawyer, but as attorney Keiji Sugiyama explained in a presentation at Fordham University, Japanese copyright law does not have a general fair use provision like the United States.
Instead, Japan has moral rights for any type of work. Sugiyama notes that while the Japanese Copyright Law does lack a general fair use provision, there are certain legal cutouts to allow for parody and private use, as well as for reproductions for schools and libraries.
But not commentary or limited use for things like a let’s draw, it seems. And there is the problem.
Again, it’s not an easy problem to solve, but multi-billion dollar a year companies aren’t supposed to only get softballs pitched down the middle of the strike zone. The platform very much needs to figure out how to enforce copyright claims fairly in situations where the uploader is abiding by his or her country’s laws, but not by the laws of the country where the content originated. Put another way: were Toei an American or Irish animation company, this would be a simple problem to solve by counterclaiming it under fair use.
But in this case? Well, it seems the end result due to YouTube is that an Irish uploader must abide by Japanese copyright law. And that can’t seriously be the world anyone wants.
Filed Under: anime, content id, copyright, dmca, mark fitzpatrick, takedowns
Comments on “YouTuber Has 150 Anime Reviews And 'Let's Draws' Hit With Copyright Claims All At Once”
Protip
Save copies of all your YouTube videos offline so you don’t lose them if shit.like this happens.
Re: Protip
Relying on "the cloud" (i.e. someone else) to handle your backups is asking for heartache.
Re: Protip
Losing the video itself isn’t the problem here. He’s not using YouTube for video storage, but to make money.
Except the MPAA /RIAA members…….
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Here’s another funny thing happening right now in Youtube.
Employees of the Korean/Indonesian/International branch of a JAPANESE company have to abide by JAPANESE law in order to stream games. These streamers have to obtain permission from the JAPANESE RIGHTSHOLDERS or the original creators/rightsholders of the games they want to stream.
Welcome to the world of bullshit copyright law.
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Call them MAFIAA, it’s more fitting to their tactics.
Simple solution would be an appeals process that lets you mark ‘this is fair use’ — then let it only be restricted in the countries that lack protections after a complaint. If Toei wanted to then sue him bc they disagreed in a jurisdiction OTHER than japan, have at it.
To me, sometimes an ounce of prevention might outweigh a pound of cure… let users ‘self flag’ their titles ahead of time and attest that they are fair use. Then push back against these copyright claims in a two-way adjudicated process, rather than a one system that lets one country’s bad laws stifle speech and creativity of others.
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That would require work on YouTube’s part. You know that the whole process is completely automated, right? Even the appeal process is automated. Nobody actually looks at those appeals, they just get automatically denied.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
If I commit a crime, the applicable jurisdiction seems to me to be generally "where the crime is committed." I know that there are some occasions where that doesn’t apply – if I murder a Japanese citizen on USA soil, both Japan and the USA could claim jurisdiction, I think, but such situations don’t really apply to copyright issues.
For ease of legal proceedings, I think applicable law should be legislatively set in one and only one of these locations:
1) Location of the servers upon which the material is uploaded.
2) Location of the company headquarters of the owners of the servers upon which the material is uploaded.
3) Location of the person who uploaded the material.
Location of the viewer of the material, or of the rightsholder of any alleged infringing material, should be irrelevant, because that isn’t where the crime is committed.
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Location of the servers upon which the material is uploaded.
This is, in the case of something like Youtube, a majority of the nations on Earth. Most data is uploaded to many different servers to reduce bandwidth usage and load times.
Location of the company headquarters of the owners of the servers upon which the material is uploaded.
The company who owns the servers, the company who is renting the space on the servers, or the company who hired the company who rented the servers? These are very commonly three different companies. Sometimes there are even more layers.
And is this the local headquarters, regional headquarters, or global headquarters? Is this affected by customer data localization requirements?
Location of the person who uploaded the material.
Their home address? Their passport issuer? The location they were at the time the data was uploaded? The location of the IP address they uploaded from?
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You are correct. Even though I listed this as an option, it’s not ideal for that very reason.
The company who owns the servers.
Global headquarters.
No. If it was then we’d be operating under option 1.
The location they were at when the data was uploaded. That’s where the crime was committed.
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The company who owns the servers.
Is it actually a good idea to push content issues away from the operator of the relevant service? Opening the uploader up to liability in regimes that they can’t necessarily anticipate and which could change at any moment seems rather problematic.
No. If it was then we’d be operating under option 1.
Perhaps. While there’s certainly likely to be somewhat fewer nations involved in this case compared to 1, there will still be a significant number. And as the main impetus behind data localization requirements is to apply local laws to said data, I’d expect those requirements to be swiftly updated to require use of companies with local headquarters anyway.
Option 1 and 2 appear largely identical in practice.
The location they were at when the data was uploaded.
This would produce some interesting results. There is of course the general issue of linking an upload to a specific person without being able to even suggest that you have jurisdiction yet. It would likely be impossible to enforce any laws at all (at least in the west, not sure about elsewhere), since "I might have jurisdiction" isn’t really going to get anywhere in court.
But more broadly, many countries have border "bubbles" with neighboring countries, which would make records of which country you were actually in at a specific time rather problematic. And given the given the porosity at the edges of most national borders, it would be fairly trivial to make jurisdiction impossible to establish by simply wandering close to a border. This wouldn’t mean much for most individuals (outside of border towns), but "professionals" would be entirely judgement proof in short order.
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The idea, in general, is for there to be no confusion about which country’s laws apply to uploaded material. Right now, multiple governments seem to think their laws apply globally simply because the internet is accessible in their country.
The solution to this seems to me to be that the applicable jurisdiction be based on the source of the violation, not who is affected by the violation. Just like if a bank is robbed, the jurisdiction is based on the location of the bank, not the location of the bank customer whose valuables are stolen from the safe deposit box.
That idea is guiding my choices of options 1-3, although there will always be edge cases. At some point we just have to draw the arbitrary line and say "we think this is the most workable plan."
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On the internet, "Where the ‘crime’ was committed" is the physical location where the accused was when they were doing it.
Just remember that Nintendo routinely takes down "Let’s Play" videos on any Nintendo games. The answer might be to restrict the audience of the video to not include Japan.
The problem is Googles "3 strikes and you are out" policy
One of the problems mentioned in the response video is that Mark Fitzpatrick can’t appeal all 150 take downs at once because that would result in his channel being permanently deleted by Google – which is entirely based on Google policies not copyright law.
The problem is that all the copyright strike "appeals" all are decided by the alleged copyright holder, not by YouTube. Each appeal denied by the claimant will result in a "strike" against the YouTube channel. The strikes last 90 days each. Since it only takes three to have your channel deleted Mark Fitzpatrick can only appeal a couple at a time, and the process takes months for the individual appeals – which is why he says that appealing all of the take downs would take him until he is in his 60s.
Google is giving anyone who claims to have copyright a heckler’s veto over content. By letting unjudicated claims count as strikes anyone can potentially permanently shut down a YouTube channel by making 3 or more copyright strike claims, with no consequences for making false claims.
Re: The problem is Googles "3 strikes and you are out"
Do we have any information of what kind of claims these were? I was thinking the same as you—laws have no relevance to this story—although Timothy seems to think it has something to do with Japanese copyright law, for unexplained reasons.
Re: Re: The problem is Googles "3 strikes and you are out&q
The reasons aren’t unexplained:
Re: Re: Re: The problem is Googles "3 strikes and you a
He says they "Japanese law may be where YouTube’s proverbial head is at." That’s a hypothesis, not an explanation. There’s no statement saying that "the claims" reference Japanese law or any law; they might just be ContentID, which is a private Youtube policy. (It sucks too, but for different reasons, and wouldn’t necessarily go away even if we fixed Japanese and American copyright law.)
Hey lets do everything we can to piss off our fanbase…
it works so well for Nintendo.
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They’ve weathered the shitstorm known as Metroid: Other M.
I am starting to think Nintendo might need something… physical to reconsider their policies.
What also mess up is it may not even be Toei copyright striking his videos but someone impersonating the company that how flawed the YouTube copyright ID is.
'You should advertise for us' ... 'How dare you use our stuff?!'
And another entry for the ‘companies to never financially support list’…
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It sucks but people should obey the law, regardless of if they agree with it, or not.
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Problem, you can follow the law, and get a copyright strike for content such as:
silence
birdsong
public domain music
all recorded by yourself,
And fair use depend on how the actual content owner feels about fair use.
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Rather the problem is that corporations were allowed to copyright silence, birdsongs, etc.
Hucksters claiming copyright on public domain music is a slightly different topic.
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Allow isn’t the word. The problem is that the law legalizes it.
If the law were to explicitly make copyrights on such works illegal we’d be far better off.
Unfortunately, like everything else, you need a hard legal precedent for things to change…. otherwise companies will try and get away with it regardless.
Which is to say the real problem is society’s "Profits above all else" mentality, but fixing that is an even larger mountain to climb.
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Wrong their is no real punishment for claiming things that you do not hold copyright on, and companies uploading complete works to the system which include non-copyrighted and other peoples copyrighted content that they have licensed, or included as fair use.
Also there is no downside to companies continuing to claim copyright when there is a dispute, and few people can afford to go to court and win against the companies and their lawyers.
Note that YouTube and other sites have one legal option when a valid claim is made, and that is take the work down, and to do otherwise opens them up to legal action. The only claims that they can reject are those that are defective in the details of making a claim.
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I once uploaded a 1-minute video of insect sounds, shot at night out of a darkened window. Content ID claimed that the audio had been muted due to a copyright claim by someone.
Re: Re:
Tell me you’re not a regular Techdirt reader without telling me you’re not a regular Techdirt reader.
As has been demonstrated many times in the past, even if you follow the rules/law, you can still get copyright-struck.
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He did, and then he got slammed by someone in an entirely different country for his troubles.
If you have to worry about every country’s laws then it becomes effectively impossible to put anything up since if you’re not engaging in some good old fashion blasphemy you might be tripping into some les majesty, ‘disturbing the peace’ by challenging the Official Narrative or violating some poor sap’s right to not have to deal with any ‘lascivious’ imagery/thoughts.
Arguably, it's actually worse.
Arguably, it’s actually worse.
Let’s start with the fact these appear to be manual claims. This system is built for compliance with the DMCA: an American law.
This effectively changes the context of the problem. This is a company trying to use American copyright law, against an Irish uploader, in order to enforce Japanese copyright law.
Re: Arguably, it's actually worse.
While Youtube’s system was initially developed because of American law, Ireland has very similar laws (more restrictive once the copyright directive is implemented, if it hasn’t been already) so it’s really not.
Copyright defaults to the most restrictive rules.
Perfect way to end it.
Maybe the concept behind double criminality should apply to copyright even though copyright is usually a civil matter rather than a criminal one. In addition, copyright should default to the least restrictive rules to protect fair uses.
YouTube has to follow the dmca rules otherwise it could be sued by media company’s the problem is YouTube is global and Japanese law does not allow fair use in case of video reviews by the time he appeals all the dmca takedowns he would be 60 years old Nintendo takes down game play videos all the time I can’t see YouTube changing all the rules for one company from Japan or one YouTube creator
I think Japan is thinking of easing copyright law since it makes it very difficult to re-release old video games
and we are in an online world where anyone can view content online
Things change slowly over time it took 10 years for music company’s to agree on rules to allow music to be sold online
Most content on YouTube is there because it is legal under American law
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Aww, 3 years stealing the work of others, down the Youtubes!
Don’t make theft base of your biz, pirates.
This is simply: "they’re in Japan, can’t touch me — oh, crap!"
Youtube is rightly enforcing the actual creator’s rights, which apply in any and every country. Of course that’s blanked out here, in favor of sympathy for a grifter.
[TECHDIRT SO DULL FOR SIX WEEKS that hasn’t stirred me: forcing myself to show still interested! You’re welcome.]
Re: Aww, 3 years stealing the work of others, down the Youtubes!
Wow, so besides being a deranged stalker, you’re also a copyright maximalist?
More reason to not only hate you, Badghad Bob, but also to suggest to ol’ Mike to actually do something about you.
Re: Aww, 3 years stealing the work of others, down the Youtubes!
Explain how reviewing anime/manga and giving drawing lessons is theft in any possible way.
Re: Re: Aww, 3 years stealing the work of others, down the Youtu
"Explain how reviewing anime/manga and giving drawing lessons is theft in any possible way."
That’s just old Baghdad Bob. Even back ten years or so when his "Bobmail" persona or any of his sock puppets were trolling Torrentfreak, he really went the extra distance to demonstrate that he never believed in "principles".
With him it’ll always be the biggest copyright stakeholder is always right.
He’s just sycophantically beholden to the most deplorable actor in any topic…which I guess is why he branched out into defending the alt-right and the KKK over the BLM protests.
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You really shouldn’t have. How’s that January 6th campaign coming along, jackass?
Re: Aww, 3 years stealing the work of others, down the Youtubes!
[Hallucinates events contrary to the fact that Youtube is attacking the content’s creator]