A YouTuber shared his experience on winning a copyright strike war against Toei Animation.
The success was influenced by YouTube's unique copyright rules, which supports content creators.
In a recently uploaded video, YouTuber Totally Not Mark explained the conclusion with his dispute against Toei.
The company had issued more than 150 copyright claims against his videos with a demand to have them deleted from the YouTube channel.
Fortunately, the streaming platform YouTube stepped up and supported him.
YouTube Copyright Rules
This event brought to light a YouTube copyright rule that allows flexibility on international copyright laws.
Simply put, because of the differences in copyright laws in different countries, one video may be taken down from a server but left up in another.
This will assure creators that their accounts will not be banned or taken down outright.
In Totally Not Mark's case, YouTube noticed that Japan had stricter copyright laws, whereas the US had fair use of allowances. So, they took down Totally Not Mark's videos from streaming in Japan but left it open for other countries.
The YouTuber told Kotaku in an email that "It's certainly reassuring. But with fair use so ill-respected in so many territories, and YouTube creators with no control over where their content will be shared once they upload, there's certainly a long way to go."
What Happened in Toei Copyright Claims
For reference, the YouTuber's fiasco with Toei started in December.
The animation company contacted YouTube and complained about videos that strike copyright violations. This escalated to full takedown notices.
However, YouTube did not honor Toei's removal request and asked for further justification for the copyright complaints.
Toei did not immediately respond and proceeded to manually block the videos they had flagged.
YouTube saw this as a direct violation of their copyright policy, according to Totally Not Mark. This incited a serious discussion between the Japanese YouTube team, the American YouTube team, and other related personnel.
At one point, Toei ended up submitting a new list of 86 video strikes from their initial 150 complaints.
But when the YouTuber reviewed the list, he called it "baffling" and "inconsistent." The YouTuber emphasized that "simply put, they're all okay or not," pertaining to videos that had "violated" copyright issues.
Taking his opinion in consideration, YouTube decided the copyright rule that segregates a different audience should be applied.
They noticed that the videos are English and were obviously targeting western audiences, so it should stay available to that section of the world.
Although Totally Not Mark's case is unique, he might not be the first YouTuber or streamer to encounter this problem.
As previously mentioned, this newly discovered copyright rule should greatly help other content creators who are struggling with audiences from different spectrums of the world.
Now, streamers have something to consider if ever they receive copyright strikes from a country they are not living in.
