PewDiePie Dives Into The Mark Fitzpatrick, Toei Animation Saga

from the pew-pew-pew! dept

We had just been talking about how Mark Fitzpatrick, a YouTube personality who focuses on doing reviews and let's draws for anime properties, had been targeted by Toei Animation for the takedown of over a 150 of his videos over copyright claims. Toei is the animation house for several popular animes, including the Dragon Ball series. While Fitzpatrick's videos fall squarely in the category of fair use, as they are chiefly commentary and reviews that use snippets of the animes in question in order to illustrate points, because of the onerous way YouTube enforces such claims, his videos were taken down first and remain down at the time of this writing.

Well, if Toei was hoping this would all fly under the radar, it most certainly is not. Fitzpatrick's own video complaining about how Toei is behaving itself has over 700k views. And now streaming icon Pewdiepie is inserting himself into all of this, squarely on on Fitzpatrick's side.

On December 9, PewDiePie uploaded a video reacting to Toei’s apparent mass copyright strike against Fitzpatrick, calling the studio a “big-shot company that couldn’t care less about some random anime YouTuber.”

“Japan is so notoriously dumb when it comes to copyright,” he said. “Backwards thinking or just overall lacking in what most people agree is Fair Use and not. They just don’t care. They’re a big company. That’s it.”

Now, I'm not in love with Pewdiepie's phrasing in all of this, but he certainly is correct that the manner in which Japan has constructed its copyright laws is highly problematic. There is a reason that plenty of nations have built in fair use provisions into their copyright laws and they are for situations just like this. Nothing about the use in Fitzpatrick's videos in any way threatens the business of Toei Animation. There may certainly be some commentary in his videos that Toei doesn't like, but that's a different thing. Copyright laws in general weren't created in order to give content creators the ability to suppress commentary; they were supposed to be a method for protecting the business interests of creators. Instead, there are several carveouts in Japanese copyright law that were added specifically to grant more control over how content is used for the anime and manga industries.

Pewdiepie is also no dummy on this stuff. It's his business, after all, and he knows enough about it to point to past examples of how badly this all works when it comes to properties coming out of Japan.

Kjellberg went on to compare Toei’s copyright claims to Nintendo’s failed creator program, which allowed creators to use game footage and music — provided they split their revenue.

“I think it’s important that we call these things out, so that hopefully they can listen,” PewDiePie continued. “This, what happened to Mark, just really highlights a huge issue with YouTube.”

And he then turned his sights on YouTube in full, arguing that the manner in which the platform enforces copyright claims is extremely tilted against YouTube creators.

“Any day, your livelihood on YouTube could get removed, because some big company decided, out of the blue: ‘That, no. Stop that,'” he added.

To be fair to YouTube, as I stated in the previous post on Fitzpatrick's tribulations, this is not an easy problem to solve. But it is a problem and YouTube honestly doesn't seem to be doing much about it. If that continues, there's no reason why the struggles Twitch has had retaining its creative community couldn't happen to YouTube as well.

Filed Under: anime, copyright, copyright strikes, dmca, fair use, mark fitzpatrick, pewdiepie, reviews
Companies: toei animation

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