I was just catching up on a couple days of unread AnimeNano RSS feed backlog and read about Hinano’s situation with YouTube taking down her “Otaku Idol Haruhi Dance” video. After going through the comments of that post, I’d like to add some things regarding the topic and attempting to use my rudimentary legal knowledge to complain about media companies’ throwing their weight around, distressing licit creators in the process, and YouTube’s inability to tell those companies “That’s enough!”

First, the claim by TV Tokyo seemed to be part of a blanket cease-and-desist request. That’s why it has affected her and other users who uploaded something with good intentions only to have it removed suddenly due to a media giant’s overprotectiveness. A similar thing happened when Viacom had hundreds of thousands of clips taken off, including an innocent 30-second video of someone’s dinner at a restaurant called Redbones.

TV Tokyo should have been (and other media companies should be) more careful when submitting their claims but they probably thought better safe than sorry, i.e. “it’s more beneficial for us to cast a wide net and get all the possible offenders than to nitpick and waste valuable time and money that could be spend more usefully”. YouTube should stand for their users and their right to upload legitimate, non-infringing content that they created themselves instead of giving in.

YouTube stayed out of legal trouble in their pre-acquistion days because they agreed to take down videos as soon as copyright holders submit notices to them. Why? They couldn’t afford any lawsuits - they were bleeding bandwidth costs at the time and probably still are. Now that YT is owned by Google, they have sufficient cash to spend on legal defenses, IF they choose to do so and if cases actually go that far. Letting companies make demands and claims when you know you’re just and can prove such a thing comes off as cowardly to me. As YT’s now-parent company, Google should be more forthright with media companies who berate “well-behaving” users generating content and forcing their accounts to be purged for no good reason. However, their deals with networks and other corporations seem to be standing in the way of this happening any time soon.

About pure copyright issues, if Hinano’s dancing was at a convention (which it was) and she asked someone to videotape her, then they both should hold rights to that material since she performed on stage while adding her own distinctness to it and the cameraperson for recording it and using some knowledge of camcorder technology to zoom and pan. Enforcing a DMCA claim on a particular dance is dubious if it has entered the popular culture and if the supposedly infringing works are not. Case in point: the inventor of the electric slide, Richard Silver, copyrighted the dance in 2004, and last week issued a whole bunch of takedown notices to video sites and other people. I would compare this to the copyright on the Happy Birthday song, which IMO should be in the public domain by now and the copyright holder is just using it as a money grab until it expires in 2030, unless Congress extended the term of copyright before then. But I’m straying off-topic.

Actually, it’s more like saying you can’t do the hustle, the Macarena, or the cabbage patch without getting permission from creators of those dances. You as the music creator have written a song meant to make people move their bodies through a number of different configurations in order to perform it the “correct” way. Which ties back to the original subject of dancing to “Hare Hare Yukai”. Dancing publicly to a song and using the same moves as seen in the anime ending sequence is paying tribute to those involved in the original chereography and production of the song and most likely promoting the anime in the process. There is no viable market for Hare Hare instruction videos for that dance (FYI, SOS-Dan has a FREE step-by-step breakdown) so tell me why, TV Tokyo and other Japanese media companies, why are being so hawkish when you are not losing sales over fan parodies and various iterations of fan exuberance? Why don’t you go after the people selling fansubs and/or bootleg DVDs on eBay as they seem to be definitely taking money from your pockets?

So, Hinano, if you or anyone else wants to challenge this and try to save your account, I think you should submit a counternotice to YT following the guidelines in the removal warning e-mail you received. [Note: I'm basing this on the email I got when I uploaded anime episodes 6 months ago so the specifics may have changed a little since the acquistion. I choose not to fight that case because I was obviously in the wrong.] The third subclause involves making a statement under penalty of penjury that you have a “good faith belief that the material was removed…as a result of mistake or misidentification” of your video as infringing content. That is if you want to fight this. Or you could just eschew video-hosting sites and host your videos at your own cost.

Wow…I wrote a damn essay, didn’t I? Oh well, I hope it works out okay in the end. Now I gotta hit the hay. u_u

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 2:49 am and is filed under Editorial, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.