Anime copyrights

Internet piracy certainly is the 21st century plague, at least for the media Industry. Despites the Music majors’ victories over such peers-to-peers systems as Napster, they aren’t yet out of the wood. Indeed, such community-based free platforms as YouTube have now taken the relay and offer a new haven for the zillions adepts of free stuff, including copyrighted stuff. But the business world isn’t completely devoid of resources and is now counter-attacking again by threatening to sue anyone who is making their proucts available for free without giving back to Ceasar what’s Ceasar. To avoid a flood of trials and conserve a necessary legitimacy to keep the plateform running, YouTube has therefore decided to resort to an automated piece of software that will detect copyrighted materials and take it out automatically.

And this is where the YouTomb project comes in. Launched by some MIT members of the FreeCulture organization, its aim is to keep a record of the videos that get deleted from YouTube, not by copying the original file, but simply by scanning the YouTube feeds and recording it according to 3 categories of removals based on the legal grounds for this action. As the right-side column shows it, with its screen shots unfolding continuously, the process of video deleting on YouTube is quite astonishing. Basically, almost every second, a video gets deleted!! On 30 August 2006, Lee Gomes writes in the WSJ online that YouTube boasts about 6.1 millions videos. Two years later and considering the growth pace of this plateform, it has certainly a hundred times this number, so it isn’t that surprising that the removal pace is also so fast.

One thing though that made me almost smile (almost only), was the first titles displayed on the left-side column of the YouTomb’s front page: Prince of Tennis OVA 18 [2/3] RAW. When clicking on the Japanese name of the people who requested the removal (バンダイビジュアル株式会社), I landed on another page showing that this was far from being an isolated case. According to the YouTomb statistics, TV TOKYO Corporations comes in the 6th place among those placing the highest number of removal requests, with so far 498 claims. If you look at the videos targeted, you see that Naruto Shippuuden is one of the first “victim” of these copyrights infringements as of today (May 2, 2008)! Another hint at the importance of Japanese popular entertainment among the many products that are available? After all it comes ahead of such big weight as Warner Bros, NBC Universal or FOX. Moreover, Japan is well represented in the ranking with over 20 companies being mentioned. But then again, I guess this would be too simple. YouTomb doesn’t claim to be all inclusive and it started recently only. However, it is true that pirated files of Japanese animation are easily obtainable over the Web, especially on YouTube and DailyMotion, without reckoning other similar sites, especially those in Japan. Although I don’t have any data telling me how much of the total amount of entertainment video available (legally or illegally) on the Web Japanese animation is representing, I do know that many different actors have been making sure over the years that most best-selling series from the manga-centered industry and a lot more less well-known stories are uploaded on the Internet and made accessible for free.