GoKawiilis a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
On September 6th, YouTuber Nicholas Light posted a video to one of his channels that made it seem like all of his content was about to be removed from the platform. In the video — ominously titled “My Channel will be Deleted Today” — Light alleges that he was on the receiving end of some of the “thousands upon thousands of false copyright strikes” recently initiated by a company called Remove Your Media. Light spends much of the 13-minute video accusing Remove Your Media CEO Eric Green of being a troll who systematically targets creators whose content mentions or features clips of popular anime series like Bleach and One Piece.
It’s not clear how many of Light’s 1.3 million subscribers made it to the end of the video where he admits that YouTube already removed the copyright strikes against his account and informed him that his channel would not be deleted. But in a follow-up video titled “My Channel will NOT be deleted” posted on September 8th, Light thanked himself and “every single person that contributed” to the ongoing conversation about Remove Your Media unfairly threatening creators’ livelihoods.
When I recently spoke with Light via email, he told me that over 60 of his videos had been temporarily taken down after he was hit with over a dozen copyright strikes stemming from Remove Your Media’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests. Light said that “having a video taken down or struck is almost second nature” for people running reaction channels. But he insisted that the way Remove Your Media has been going after creators is abusive and unrelated to any legitimate interest in protecting copyrighted IP.
“I think [Remove Your Media is] trying to get the attention of these companies, to hopefully get hired by them,” Light said. “But because they’re so sloppy, they’re damaging themselves. With all the major channels covering this, they’re doomed.”
While it’s easy to get the sense that Light might have been playing up some of this drama for viewers’ attention, it is clear that a number of other content creators have similarly been hit with an inordinate amount of copyright strikes. Many of these creators specialize in anime and gaming reaction videos that feature blurred-out or otherwise altered pieces of copyrighted footage. The creators superimpose the altered copyrighted footage (like anime opening sequences or full episodes) onto videos of themselves reacting to and/or commenting on it.
Though these types of videos are kind of like an inverse Mystery Science Theater 3000 where the on-camera creators are meant to be the focus, viewers can also use them as a (less-than-ideal) way to watch copyrighted material without having to pay for it. The creators insist that their content is fundamentally transformative and protected by fair use, but that has not kept YouTube from sending them warnings about their accounts potentially being erased.
Remove Your Media feels it does not need to extensively review all of a creator’s videos to file DMCA takedowns in good faith
Remove Your Media legal representative Evan F. Stone told me that Viz Media and Crunchyroll are two of the company’s “biggest anime clients.” Stone explained that Remove Your Media “reports thousands of allegedly infringing links every day” — some of which are “forwarded by the copyright owners themselves,” while others are discovered through online searches. Stone also noted that some clients are “very lenient” with certain types of content, despite their weak fair use defense. But he was adamant that the content being produced by YouTubers Remove Your Media has gone after is not transformative enough to fall under fair use.
“Commentary, in this context, does not make the use transformative: these videos show the copyrighted work in its entirety, and a great deal of this content sits behind a paywall,” Stone said. “Add the fact that some viewers are watching these versions rather than the licensed versions, and the effect on the marketplace is real.”
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