My YouTube rant

[usamimi]

Yeah, I rarely comment on videos myself, because most of the time people ignore them, anyway. Half the time it's either sockpuppet accounts for trolls or spambots. ;P

[davemerrill]

A day or two ago, I set the few problem videos to publish comments only after my approval. The majority of my videos don't really attract a ton of people, especially the ones involving driving around the Japanese countryside, or videos of me putting together a plastic model. Even the plastic model videos that have viewership in the tens of thousands don't really get much crappy comments. Going forward, I may set up "comments pending approval" to be the default for all my videos.

I've learned my lesson not to respond by pointing out their immaturity and hypocrisy and such. They thrive on conflict. Just delete and instantly block the user from the channel.

Do Not Feed The Trolls. It's not just a good idea, it's a way of life.

[_D_]

I got kicked off for policy violation when they first started. Never got another account. I was feeding a lot of material to others in Canada to post but that was the only involvement with YouTube in the past 10 years. Many people have left them and set up their own sites as YouTube got too big and cranky.

[Daniel]

In general, I treat the AnimePast YouTube account as nothing more than advertising to try to get the word out about this site and forum. The comments that I tend to get on the videos I've got up are appalling. I feel like I could have a more intellectually satisfying conversation with my dog than with the vast majority of YouTube account holders. However, I have no interest in making some community around the AnimePast YouTube channel -- this forum is what I care about.

[greg]

In general, I treat the AnimePast YouTube account as nothing more than advertising to try to get the word out about this site and forum.

Have you had any copyright infringement warnings? I bet this is what D is talking about. I had uploaded some commercials to the Macross: DYRL movie that I had recorded from my LD of the film. Those commercials come after the end of the movie. I had it on my channel for about a year and then I got a notice saying that I may have uploaded content belonging to so-and-so company that made the LD, so I just deleted the video. Before that, I had uploaded the opening credits to Future Boy Conan, and immediately I received a message saying that I had uploaded content belonging to TMS or Nippon Animation or whatever company it is. I deleted that one immediately. So, I gave up on uploading any sort of anime content to my YT channel because it's not worth the hassle or the risk of having my account revoked for copyright violation.

Last year, Sega went around claiming copyright infringement on tons of videos, particularly involving the Shining Force series of games, and completely abused their rights to do so. Some of the videos did not even contain gameplay footage, and were merely webcams of people stating their names and their history of loving the Shining Force series. Basically, Sega claimed that they owned the rights to their faces and voices and had their videos removed. People suddenly had multiple strikes against their accounts and suddenly found their channels terminated as a result of Sega's abuse. It was sickening. There was some retaliation for the way they were treating their own fans, and they seemed to back off. Still, it's sickening that they would do so.

[_D_]

Yes, I would like to see a court case where they claim copyright infringement over here then try to explain away doujinshi in their own country as tolerated infringement. So, what would fair use come under? Tim Eldred says the fansite is considered fair use as far as he is concerned. So far, they haven't been back to bother him as far as I know. These companies do allow fansites in Japan though, so how do they explain that away?

[Daniel]

Have you had any copyright infringement warnings?

Yes, I have. On the one hand, it is slightly silly. But on the other hand, they're in a really difficult position -- letting people upload videos is just a lawsuit (or two or three or four) waiting to happen, and it would not be cost-effective to have humans manually approve/disapprove videos as they come up, so I think that the automatic copyrighted content detection algorithms that they've got in place is a fair compromise. The cases where people have gone through and indiscriminately claimed copyright infringement on harmless videos, such as what I believe you're telling me that Sega did last year, is a different story, however.

[UniQueLyEviL]

The golden glory days of Google and Youtube are quickly coming to an end...=\

[greg]

Yes, I am slowly starting to upload videos to DailyMotion.com because of all this. Forcing Google+ on everyone was pretty bad. The people who like Facebook are already on Facebook and would rather not use another such social media. The rest of us who don't care about Facebook are not on it, so therefore forcing us to sign up with a Google+ account just to use YouTube is not going to make people happy.

In December, another big upset was about the stupid copyright content scanners on YouTube detecting music from video games on game-related videos and flagging them for content. People who actually make a living by doing game reviews and Let's Play videos are now suddenly unable to make money off of those videos, just because a fragment of some music happened to be included in the video. More incredibly, it's not even the game companies making these claims, but some sort of music associations making claims. Moreover, it's been discovered that a few of these are not even the proper copyright holders, but some trolls who've figured out a way to arbitrarily make false copyright claims for content that isn't even theirs.

I have a video of me recording video footage of a cool toy store I took a few years ago in America. It's blocked now in some countries because in the store, they were playing a song by Animal Collective. Why should anyone care that anyone can hear a garbled version of their song playing in the background of me in a store, not even in its entirety, with me talking on top of it and other random sounds from inside the store? "Oh, well, I guess I don't have to buy their album. I'll just watch this video of a toy store instead."

What they really need to focus on are people who upload entire songs, albums, movies, and show episodes without permission. A few days ago, I came across the full movie of Nausicaa on YouTube. Why don't they just crack down on videos like that?

There seems to be no common sense when it comes to copyright enforcement.