YouTube Removed 30,000 Japanese Videos from Site

Grooves writes "YouTube has been asked to remove almost 30,000 videos from their site, according to reports. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) found 29,549 videos on the site that had materials contained in them that where not authorized by rights holders. From the article, 'A spokesperson for that organization said that they were considering petitioning YouTube for a better screening process. Although YouTube is legally obligated to remove infringing material when notified, some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves.' Now that Google's is attached to the site, will events like this become more commonplace?"

Wow.

That must be like 5% of the Naruto videos up there.

Re:Wow.

"Japanese broadcast giant *NHK* was among those seeking the removal of materials."

It's a conspiracy!

Re: Saving space

Think of all the space that could be saved if YouTube managed to remove duplicate Naruto videos ;-)

That's unfortunate....

That's really unfortunate. Some of those Japanese shows are hilarious, and watching videos from foreign shows is a great glimpse into another culture.

Re:That's unfortunate....

watching videos from foreign shows is a great glimpse into another culture

Yes. Laughing at the weird customs of foreigners brings us together as a human family.

Re:That's unfortunate....

Yeah, how dare that guy say he likes funny TV shows and exploring other cultures. What a racist, you give it to him, man.

Re:That's unfortunate....

Are you fucking serious? We're not talking about "weird customs" here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlAkOhH9eek [youtube.com]

Japanese game show - the goal: To make it through a tongue twister without screwing up. The penalty: A swift wack to the groin with the slap-o-matic 2000.

Seriously.. Comedy gold.

A Favorite Moment Of Japanese TV

Slightly OT, I know, but I just had to share. While in Japan for my honeymoon, I was often up at odd hours while my wife was sleeping because of the time change. I turned onto one comedy show that seemed like a cross between Jackass and MAD TV. They had a segment called, "No Reaction Theatre," where people had to continue acting while various distractions tried to draw their attention. In this case, people above them on the scaffolding would drop large aluminum foil cookpans onto their heads. It didn't hurt so much as cause a loud noise and throw them off. So they would be in the middle of this soap-opera-esque moment lamenting why someone died, with tears in their eyes, looking up, and then WHAM! Baking pan in the face! The show culminated with about 100 pans being dropped onto a group funeral scene over and over again.

They are geniuses. American TV could learn something from them.

Re:That's unfortunate....

Yes. Laughing at the weird customs of foreigners brings us together as a human family.

What I miss is the magician. In the USA, the bigger and flashier the better. In Japan the smaller close-up but seemingly impossible magic is what I found interesting. Anyone else amazed at the glass trick where a salt shaker is passed up through a glass top table? How about tossing a playing card inside a fishtank, then reaching through the tank back glass to fetch the card? Another street magic trick is the one where he tapes a piece of paper onto a shop front window, then goes inside the shop, then comes out by tearing a hole through the paper and climbing through, then removing the paper showing an intact glass window. Wow. That leaves a lot of the US flashy magic tricks looking pretty pale.

I'm going to miss the magic shows.

By the way, anybody know how he did that?

Re:That's unfortunate....

In other news Google is selling Youtube for $10,000 on eBay.

Lets hope their purchase wasnt a mistake and we keep getting cool videos out of it.

Re:That's unfortunate....

Seriously, Television and video are the best look into another culture possible. The argument that posting Japanese television video is a violation of so-called intellectual property is completely negated by the value of having a window into Japan available to the rest of the world.

    The one thing that the so-called intellectual property 'owners' don't understand is that the only thing worse than having someone view your video without paying is to have no one interested in viewing your video at all. And every step that they take to close off access to public viewing of their video products sends the public into other directions for interesting videos. Directions that are not under the control of the video or music industries and directions that are unable to generate profits for the video and music industries.

    That is the whole point of the YouTube phenomenon. Young people are very interested in seeing videos that are outside of the control of the global media giants. And interested in not paying money for the experience. Any normal person could figure this out, but media executives and lawyers are not normal people. Their brains work differently.

    In other words, the media industry needs to learn that removing your products from the new general media outlets seriously decreases long-term demand for your products. And a serious decrease in demand means for them a serious decrease in the advertising revenue stream.

    One would think that they would have learned this lesson from the demise of network television over the past twenty years. But again, their brains just don't work like ordinary brains do.

    The global media companies will be gone in twenty years, Good riddance!

Nothing to see here.

Please move along.

Who didn't see this coming?

Seriously. Did anyone, including Google, not see this coming?

no, even google saw it coming.

Google is not managed by idiots. If they are going to shell out $1.6B for a commodity (even it's only $1.6B in stock and not cold, hard, cash), you can bet there was some due diligence involved. If you look at similar previous businesses-- Napster is the best that comes to mind.. Napster raked in a bunch of VC cash for Sean Fanning, and then it went down the tubes, but this was mostly as a result of failing to forsee the legal problems they would encouter. Google, no doubt, has already forseen this, and probably has developed a very robust (and hopefully flexible.. since web 2.0 is in its infancy) business model. One major difference between YouTube and Napster is that Napster was virtually 100% copyrighted (pirated) content. YouTube is probably 50% pirated content, with the other 50% being unique content (vlogs, etc) from users more interested in social networking, and I suspect in some ways these are more "valuable" users to google (in that they surf more often, are more susceptible/amenable to ads, etc). Of the pirated content, I suspect around 25-50% of the rights-owners actually "care enough" to pursue the fact that it is being exhibited on the web without royalties to them. The remainer are cellphone camera bootlegs of concerts, people singing covers of their favorite songs, etc.

After about 30 seconds of brainstorming, I can imagine google will focus on the social networking users (I already see YouTube making huge headway against MySpace-- watching a video of someone on their profile gives LOADS more parsable clues about them than a few blurry "MySpace Angles" photos), and secondarily attempt to convince many copyright holders to PROMOTE their retail content on YouTube rather than just ask them to cease and desist. This promotion could come in the way of YouTube "premier access" videos or site area, driven by g-checkout (or whatever its name is), where users pay for individual access to videos (at $.05 a view for a 2 minute video? maybe..) or perhaps for a site-wide access on a monthly fee basis. Or this promotion could come in the way of simply trying to pursuade copyright holders to let heir heavily compressed 320x240 webvideo stay up, with blatant text links/banners to the official site or whatever. As someone who actually creates commercial video content (I make documentaries, but have directed other projects such as music videos, etc), this is a situation I am amenable to. I'd be fine with google showing excepts of my last couple of films (extreme sports stuff), with context links on the page to buy the DVD, or maybe to "jamster" type ringtone sites that sell my video ringtones (which I don't actually have, but funny story, a large distributor [rhymes with Barner Wrothers] approached us to distribute our latest film, and one of their executive's biggest sales pitches to us [this was around a yr ago] was doing video ringtones-- "they're going to be huge!"). Also, remember, even if YouTube can't turn a profit on its own, the data-mining possibilities are endess... let's say I use my YouTube account (i am logged in via cookie) to watch lots of Morrissey videos. Then I google search for "documentary." There is [hypothetically] a new documentary coming out about Morrissey's legal battles with former Smiths bandmates, and now google can serve me context ad content based on the context of not just what I searched for, but what google also know me to enjoy. The correlations that can be made by cross referencing this content are pretty friggin extensive. I am positive this hasn't escaped their attention.

So in short, yes, everyone (including the big G) saw this coming. Expect some cool adaptations soon, I do hope.

Sidenote: I think that there is probably an amazing documentary to be made about the goings-on inside google.. what it means to work on the campus, how google employees are treated differently than typical IT employees, how they foster innovation, how they continue to push the envelope of how to do business on the web, their expansion into china (and grappling wi

That is very insightful

You must be new here.

Noooooo!!!

How will the world get its homemade music videos that make anime characters look like they're swooning to Evanescence or singing Rammstein, now?

Re:Noooooo!!!

The public fansub groups and things have always been generally good at no longer making things available that were legitimately released. I imagine that's what keeps the goodwill up between them and the producers. However, the digital and filesharing stuff seems to spell doom for that sort of thing.

*cue the "memory lane" ripple dissolve effect with harp strumming*

I remember back when fansubs were scratchy Nth-generation videotapes, converted from Japanese videotapes or recordings from television, with subs added via the chunky digital fonts that ancient camcorders used to caption 1980s wedding videos with. Fan groups in colleges and stuff swapped them quietly amongst themselves. It was usually good enough for viewing the story, but only just, and buying the official release would be a huge leap forward quality-wise. Fansubs weren't competing with the official releases then, you still had a reason to buy the real thing. Nowadays, they're often pretty indistinguishable from a file ripped from a brand new DVD, you can download a copy with the a/v quality just as perfect as the original digital Japanese DVD or TV signal.

Re:Noooooo!!!

Fansubs (of unlicensed anime), and AMVs have generaly been considered O.K. by the Japanese companies that hold the rights to these shows.

What the hell dope you been smoking? They have never been ok with them EVER. Its just in the past they never prosecuted them because they had no plans to sell the shows here. Now just about all of their stuff has deals lined up so its in their best interests (and the company who bought the rights.)

The idea that they where ok with it is a bogus excuse the fansubbers have used for years to justify them breaking international copyright laws. Doesnt mean they where right though.

Re:Noooooo!!!

> They have never been ok with them EVER. Its just in the past they never prosecuted them because they had no plans to sell the shows here.

So... they were ok with it since they had no plans to sell the shows here

I don't get it.

they were considering petitioning YouTube for a better screening process.

By "better process", do you mean, I dunno, having one?

Re:I don't get it.

Many music and video publishers are calling on Youtube, Google, Myspace, etc. to start screening using automated audio/video "fingerprinting" technologies. Here's a recent news article on a pirated music recognition offering [yahoo.com] that would really hurt Gootube in the short term. In the long term, I'd like to think that such anti-piracy measures would make submitted videos more original and interesting, but maybe I'm being naive.

Re:I don't get it.

According to their copyright policy [youtube.com] they place the burden squarely on the uploaders. I'm sure it's for legal reasons. If they claim to screen all content they may become liable for any content that gets through. But they should at least attempt a more rigorous screening process than just waiting for random people to flag it.

Re:I don't get it.

I think the issue is more along the lines of "Does YouTube have an obligation to pre-screen videos?"

AFAIK, YouTube's only legal obligation is to remove copyrighted materials when notified. Copyright was was written with the notiont that "it's your copyright, you protect it."

"If they claim to pre-screen any content they may become liable for all content that gets through."
I switched "any" and "all".
Isn't that how the system works?

Why is this news?

Why is this news? YouTube says if you notice a video that is hosted without permission of copyright holders to let them know and they will remove it, and this is just one japanese corporation using that policy?

Tonight @ 11: My bank stops sending me paper statements upon my request! SHOCKING!

No wonder why I couldn't find any Polysics videos!

Now I'll actually have to buy their albums!

...and so it begins

Can anyone really be surprised?

Suddenly YouTube is worth a bundle of cash. We all knew it would happen.

All in all, I'd say this is a very gentle way of saying to the **AA that we're going to try to do the right thing.

On second thoughts, they already would have said that in private discussions, behind closed doors.

This is the way to prepare the rest of us. Then it won't seem so bad when they come down like a ton of bricks on the US infringements. It won't hurt their market so much.

Re:Google is goin' down

I remember a time when there was a piece of software that allowed people to share multimedia files. It was great, you could post legal files that didn't have copyright issues

In what bizarro universe did this happen?

Just wait youtube will go the way of p2p

You mean it will make up more than 50% of internet traffic at any given time? Not bad for a start.

Re:Google is goin' down

You realize that the vast majority of files on Napster were not legal, and did indeed have copyright issues, don't you? It wasn't this free love hippy utopia, it was the grimy streets of Tortuga, and we were all dirty pirates.

Arr.

police

some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves

And exactly whose job should that be?

Re:police

Traditionally, the government's executive branch is responsible for catching law-breakers, and the judiciary for dealing with them.

On the flip side, copyright infringement is traditionally a civil matter. Recent legislation in some jurisdictions has changed this. Perhaps this fairly recognises that the speed any damage is done today will be vastly faster than the speed of any protracted civil court proceedings, or perhaps it's because of lobbying from Big Media who want to reduce their overheads; take your pick.

I'm not completely decided on this one, but you can certainly understand content providers feeling that the government should act against organisations who, let's be fair, basically run a business model predicated on ripping off those content providers in violation of the law.

Get Over It.

Although YouTube is legally obligated to remove infringing material when notified, some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves.

As opposed to the print world, or the spoken world, where... They need to find and notify the authorities of copyright infringement.

I understand the feeling that 'I shouldn't need to do this' that brings up that statement. But it has always been the copyright holder's problem to identify infractions. YouTube is no different in that regard, besides that it brings a lot of creations together in one place.

Re:Get Over It.

Exactly, how is YouTube supposed to know that any particular video being uploaded contains copyright infringements ? Even if they had someone visually checking each video that person cannot be expected to know of and recognise every single copyrighted piece of work in the world which may be incorporated into an uploaded video.

The only people who absolutely know that a video contains copyrighted materials are the copyright owners and in this case they have made the identification, YouTube have removed the content and the world is as it should be.

The company involved can complain as much as they like that their copyrighted material should not be distributed in this manner but there is simply no sensible way in which the system can work other than the way it does. Perhaps if you could "fingerprint" every millisecond of video with a unique identifier which could be checked against a copyright database then that would change but I don't think there is any such system in place today.

Re:Get Over It.

All videos contain copyrighted information, as everything anyone creates is automatically copyrighted. The question is not "is this copyrighted" but "do the copyright holders give their permission for this to be posted" - which is, unfortunatly, even harder to answer.

what copyright provides

The power of copyright does not include forcing an obligation onto governments or common carriers to search or police the content. The power of copyright gives the owner a right to take down specific infringing works.

Every scribble, photo, sculpted shape or soundbite you create is copyrighted as soon as you create it. This goes for everybody within the copyright-abiding hemisphere, which obviously means that the number of copyrighted works outnumbers the population by a very large factor. Clearly, not all rights-holders are trying to enforce those rights against every transgression, thankfully. Grouse all you want, but if you own a copyright, you are the only party who should be obligated to do anything about it.

Some carriers might impose a licensing check before submissions can be completed, or they might impose occasional purges like this even without the copyright owners having to complain, but the vast majority of carriers do not (and should not) impose any such hurdle to allowing their users to publish. This is the central promise of public broadcasting and collaboration by network.

If every sheet of paper needed permission before it could hold an idea in ink, we would still be scratching words in the dirt and looking over our shoulders.

Yatta?

Will this mean the dissapearance of the Yatta [wikipedia.org] video? What about Matrix Ping Pong? [wikipedia.org].

I can do without all the JPop though...

automated dupe removal

Given the low-pass signature identification algorithms we have discussed lately, I would really like to see a duplicate-video cull on these sites. There seems to be fifty copies of each of the more popular clips, cloned and re-posted to video.google and youtube in some kind of karma-whoring frenzy.

I bet there are more than 30,000 dupes if you just count the 3,000 top-rated video clips.

Causing bad image?

I'm not suprised. I seen too many clips from weird japanese tv-shows on Internet. People making idiots from themselves, running naked, shooting sperm, diving in hot water to watch boobs.... Based on those videos, image of japanese people is clear: they are lunatics, they are insane, their society is really fucked up.

So Japanese took the first step to correcting (hiding?) this public image of them.

They looked...

...the gift horse in the mouth then kicked it squarely in the balls just like the *AA's have been doing for years. They have just kicked the best free advertisement they could have had to the curb. Granted, the material may be copyrighted, but the quality is extremely poor. The material is seen by persons who then sometimes seek out and want to purchase higher quality videos/music to support various forums of artistic expression. Nice way to shut out customers that they could have gotten for free. I guess they must be preparing to earn their money through lawsuits rather than through a legitimate business transaction which wins over customers. Money seems to be one helluva drug, seeing how it blinds upper corporate echelon.

Those Poor Copyright Holders

some copyright holders have expressed irritation at the notion that they need to police YouTube themselves

Yeah, that's tough. I mean, corporate copyright holders have spent millions buying politicians to protect their cash streams with the full force of the federal government for 120 years. Clearly it's unreasonable to expect them to stop counting their money and actually expend some effort on their own behalf. Everyone else should be doing it for them!

Re:Copyright holder != international megacorp

Yes, I would - if only for lack of imagination.

The "small, specialist outfits" are precisely the ones who could benefit most from the huge, free exposure that a YouTube provides - they should be embracing this opportunity. Instead, however, they band together (as the JASRAC group in the TFA) and use the same jackboot tactics as their big corporate brethren.

The draconion copyright statutes instituted by the megacorps certainly aren't there to help the little guys - they're there to maintain the status quo. The small outfits should be clamoring for new advertising and distribution channels like YouTube and P2P, but they're not. In their silence they are complicit with the RIAA and MPAA thugs.

I don't understand

As always they want to remove everything instead of thinking first. What kind of quality does YouTube have? Sh*t, everybody knows. Those videos should be classified as promotional material. Instead removing them, they should lower the resolution (as if there's need for it already) and audio quality (look previous brackets) and add some intro like 'If you want to see it in proper way - Buy It!'. That would be much better than removing it.

Best part is that this process can be easily automated so videos marked as copyrighted by MPIA or similar can be automatically 'copyright marked'. That would create a lot of revenue for artists and a lot of fun for ordinary people.

Shame that they cannot think in this way. Create - not destroy!

Cross-Pollination

Adult Swim aside, without exposure like this there is little chance of American folks becoming fans. Heck, I've been using YouTube for the last few days to help buy Anime (check for popularity and samples) for my kids and myself for Christmas. Bad move.

Re:Cross-Pollination

Exposure is one thing, posting entire seeeasons of episodes from TV shows is something entirely different. If this were simply a quesiton of exposure then why not put up one or two espisodes or the first 5-10 minutes of each episode with some information on when and where to watch the show? Posting copyrighted material online without consent is not about exposure or fighting the man, it's about getting shit for free, period.

Non-dubbed anime.

Youtube was the easiest to use source of non-dubbed sub-titled anime. Why can't Cartoon network just sub-title their anime shows instead of dubbing the crap out of them.

The voice actors for most dubbed anime aren't very good and you lose a lot of information.

This is EXACTLY how copyright law works

As a copyright holder, it's YOUR responsibility to defend your rights. Once properly notified, an offender or facilitator (like YouTube) is obligated to take action, but "policing" is the (C) holder's problem.

Your Job sucks?

What do you do all day?

I work for The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers. I brows YouTube all day looking for pron, i mean illegal japanese material that does not belong on YouTube...

Just imagine their annual review...

"Good Job Li, you found 3,000 illegal videos on YouTube. Too bad Jin found 5,000 illegal videos. 15 lashings and you need to work more than your normal 60 hours a week!" :)

Reasonable.

My first thought when I heard this story was, "What does it matter to them? No one outside of Japan will ever get their programming anyway."

But then my friend made a very good point. Youtube was sold for $1.6 billion in no small part because they attracted viewers with copyrighted programming. They certainly have made little effort in the past to block that kind of material.

That friend has been in a similar situation where someone running a site overseas goes and essentially takes his copyrighted flash games and puts them on their site without his permission. They then lure visitors using my friend's, and other people's, creations in order to make money on advertising.

Why Youtube was ever worth $1.6 billion is beyond me.

That explains a few things.

I headed up a group on Youtube that posted rare videos and live shows of independent Japanese bands. We went unmolested for the most part until the last months, when we were hit with a sweeping ban that affected some of our biggest contributors.

Some of the bans sort of made sense, as there are some decidedly uncommercial bands on major labels in Japan (sort of a "whoops, totally forgot" situation). Also, there was a major crackdown by Japanese music TV channel Spaceshower TV, which a good many of the videos were recorded off of. Some banned videos, however, puzzled us.

For example, my offending videos included hand-held recordings of a long-defunct indie band Naht that were taken at the Black Cat club in Washington DC. Naht was one of my favorite bands in college, so I was overjoyed that I was able to find such rare footage and immediately wanted to share it. I'm dissapointed it was removed from youtube.

I was eventually given a permanent ban, although I hadn't uploaded anything in months. Bad timing, too, because I had switched the group back to "group leader approves videos" because of horrible video spam. It's too bad, too; a great Israeli noise group called Gaop started uploading videos. Not Japanese, but good stuff, so I kept it on.

I respect and understand my ban, but I'm still dissapointed. Maybe I should start digging around for stuff on the Chinese punk scene, see how youtube censors those.

Rights holders?

I wonder, did they prove they have rights to those 30,000 videos? Or they just sent a note to GooTube requiring them to remove the videos and GooTube just silently swallowed that?

Of course. YouTube is the next Napster

Of course this happened. YouTube is the next Napster. Same centralized hosting of uploaded content, same business model, same excuses, same legal problems. YouTube is in a worse legal position than Napster. Napster just hosted the index. YouTube hosts the actual content.

YouTube could well be shut down by an injunction. That's what happened to Napster. "Napster is enjoined from copying or assisting or enabling or contributing to the copy or duplication of all copyrighted songs and musical compositions of which the plaintiffs hold rights." -- U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.

As for it being the responsibility of the copyright holder to find the material, "Napster wrote the software; it's up to them to write software that will remove from users the ability to copy copyrighted material," -- Judge Patel

YouTube, like Napster, is a contributory infringer. "The district court determined that plaintiffs had demonstrated they would likely succeed in establishing that Napster has a direct financial interest in the infringing activity. We agree. Financial benefit exists where the availability of infringing material "acts as a 'draw' for customers." -- 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

I was amazed that Google bought YouTube. It was obvious they were buying into a huge litigation problem.

Pythagoras Switch remains

Thankfully, the Pythagoras Switch (pitagora suicchi) Rube Goldberg machine videos are still up. Great example of sharing fun stuff from one country to the delight of kids (and adults!) all over the world.

Pointless endeavor...

Oh shucks...a bunch of Japanese media that can't be obtained outside of Japan anyway, will no longer be available in a blurry pixelated format on the internet...Thank god for protecting the artists' rights!!!

bullshit

We all know that this censorship makes the Great FireWall of China look puny by comparison.

They took down political comentary, and criticism of the Jap Govt, not "copyrighted" material.

Andy Out!

American media corps don't want you watching YouT

...ube at all. No doubt they had a hand in reporting the programs and surely will not stop there. They would like to see all foreign programs barred for whatever reason simply because an eyeball glued to YouTube is NOT an eyeball glued to the major networks. If they could ban the home videos on YouTube they'd like to see that done too.

They perhaps are beginning to realize that the drop in their revenue is not so much because of media piracy, but because there's just so darn much competition that's been enabled by the internet and they're getting beat up. And unfortunately, it's not like there's just one upstart that they can buy-out and assimilate, there's millions of individual, independent content sources out there that's diluting their monopoly. Boo-hoo about that, but watch out because they've got their claws out, and I expect there are some underhanded moves in store up ahead...

The youth market is no doubt severely affected-- the draw of internet media or video games is dragging the eyeballs away from the dinosaur networks in droves and they're pretty darn scared about it-- or if they aren't, they ought to be. They certainly deserve to be...