// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Anime reaction YouTubers are at war with copyright enforcers
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Content creators say their videos are fair use, but one controversial company begs to differ.
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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.”