Nintendo Shuts Down Fun Faux ‘Pokemon Documentary’ YouTuber Via Copyright Strikes
from the nintendon't dept
We all should know by now that Nintendo is incredibly protective of its IP. When it comes to anything having to do with Pokémon specifically, all the more so. While they would tell you that they’re just protecting their IP, the end result is that some of the biggest Pokémon fans out there that just want to do some fun things that represent no harm to Nintendo get shut down by threats, lawyers, or copyright strikes.
Take the YouTube series called PokeNational Geographic, for instance. While this YouTube series has been pushing out faux nature documentary videos about Pokémon for several years, the channel behind it just got hit with a bunch of copyright strikes from Nintendo.
In a video posted to an alternate channel, Elious says that Nintendo of America suddenly issued numerous strikes on large batches of his videos, all in the space of 12 hours. At the time he posted the video, a total of 20 videos had been caught up in four separate copyright strikes which encompass the entirety of the videos. With YouTube’s three-strikes policy, this means his channel is now pending deletion by YouTube and will disappear in seven days.
Elious says the strikes claim his channel is inappropriately using “content used in Pokémon video games including audiovisual works, characters, and imagery.” Elious’ videos consist of original 3D animation of various Pokémon in the “wild,” with a David Attenborough–style narration sharing various facts about Pokémon like Magikarp, Squirtle, Magnemite, Snom, Mew, Charizard, and more. He has been producing these videos on this channel since as far back as 2023 without issue, and claims in his video that the only actual content he took directly from the games was “tiny sprite roars” that last less than three seconds, adding that numerous other Pokémon creators on YouTube, as well as AI-produced channels mimicking his own, use images or footage directly from the games with no issue.
So, why now? There’s no way to know for sure, but Elious did recently launch a Patreon account so that fans could compensate them for the series. The general speculation is that once Elious attempted to make any kind of money from his video series, that spurred Nintendo to send the copyright strikes. And for many people, that will make complete sense.
I don’t understand that point of view. Regardless of any money changing hands, this still doesn’t represent any threat or harm to Nintendo or the Pokémon franchise. If anything, fun little fan videos like this only propel interest in the product. They represent free engagement lures for fans of Pokémon. Why in the world is copyright striking this channel to hell a better option than working out a free or cheap licensing arrangement with Elious so that they can keep producing the series and Nintendo can reap some of the benefit?
Or, hell, Nintendo could have tried to have a conversation with Elious, at least.
Elious continues by saying that he isn’t opposed to just deleting all the Pokémon videos if Nintendo of America asks, but he wishes he could keep his nearly 100,000 subscribers so he can keep making videos of other things, as he has on the channel in the past.
“I can’t really fight this,” Elious says. “It all seems legitimate, it does seem to come from the actual, real Nintendo of America. I can’t fight this. I don’t…I don’t know what to do about it because it’ll remove everything. I’m downloading stuff, of course, I have like, all the videos myself. But I’ll never be able to post them again, and I’ll never be able to use this channel again. Almost 100,000 subscribers over three years of making these animations and it’s all going to be gone in seven days.”
It’s simply too bad that Nintendo would rather worship at the altar of intellectual property than get creative with how it can support its fans. Thanks to IP maximalist thought, here is just a little more fun that Nintendo has flushed down the toilet.
Filed Under: copyright, culture, elious, fan art, faux documentary, pokemon
Companies: nintendo, pokemon company, youtube
Comments on “Nintendo Shuts Down Fun Faux ‘Pokemon Documentary’ YouTuber Via Copyright Strikes”
It makes perfect sense. Fuck you. That’s why.
Microsoft fucks you over because you are too small for them to care about.
Nintendo fucks you over because they hate you for being you. Nintendo HATES its fans. Disney isn’t much better.
I recently saw a video about a cosplayer who went to Galaxy’s edge. The kicker? No cosplay. No wearing anything that will make them mad. Don’t make too much of a scene. So on. You can go and pay them their money, but if you fan girl too much and go outside the lines of their perfect corporate rules, then you get nuked.
That, right there is Nintendo in a nutshell. You are only allowed to use their consoles how they want you to. You are only allowed to play their games how and when they want you to. And if you do anything outside of the box they have given you, they will crush you like the dirty peasant you are.
Everyone who continues to be a fan of corporate overlords that hate them, deserve all the shit they give out. It’s hilarious watching all the Switch 2 owners constantly whining about the most recent way that Nintendo has decided they will just ban them and brick their Switch.
Stop playing fucking trash games, that stopped actually being good a decade ago, and go fucking support game developers that will shout you out for loving their games too much.
For example Larian studios or ConcernedApe. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/simulation/concernedape-doesnt-really-try-stardew-valley-mods-but-read-an-article-about-the-larian-approved-baldurs-gate-3-mashup-and-thinks-its-cool/
Their site, their rules
I like the way that this kid is so sure youtube is the only way to promote his content. Like there are no other video sharing sites and no way to create a web site of your own.
Putting years into building stuff on someone elses property to then act surprised when they arbitrarily decide to demolish it all? Grow up.
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Like it or not, youtube is the big dog in the market. And even if he were to post it on another large platform like tiktok Nintendo would just nuke it all over.
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Yeah, seriously. Everybody needs to think of the poor billionaire corporations! They don’t get enough, aside from billions of dollars and legal systems bent to their will…
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Eat shit.
Nintendo can sit on it and rotate
Fuck Nintendo. That is all.
Same as it ever was. Nintendo is perfectly fine with fanworks up until the exact moment someone tries to make money off them. The second that Patreon went up, Legal came down.
Gotta slightly disagree there. If they really worshipped IP laws to high heaven, boy, do I have a world leader in mind who they could go after legally. When the felon-in-chief and his administration infringe on Nintendo’s IP, crickets. When a fan so much breathes into an idea for a fan project involving Nintendo’s IP, hell hath no fury like Nintendo’s corporate lawyers.