3 Count: YouTube Battles

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: YouTuber Hit With Ungodly Number Of Anime Copyright Strikes Gets A Win For Everyone

First off today, Isaiah Colbert at Kotaku reports that YouTuber Mark Fitzpatrick has won a partial victory in his battle with Toei Animation, one that will see many of his videos restored, at least in the United States.

Fitzpatrick is well known for his long-form reviews of anime content, including material by Toei. This prompted Toei to issue more than 150 takedown notices against his channel and even caused Fitzpatrick to step away from his channel for a time.

However, now Fitzpatrick has reached an agreement with YouTube that both restores his videos and makes changes to YouTube’s policy. According to a video he uploaded, his videos will remain available in countries with a broad fair use exemption, like the United States, but not in countries like Toei’s native Japan that have narrow exemptions. It is unclear what, if any, long-term impacts this will have on YouTube policy moving forward.

2: Nintendo Music YouTuber Who Received 4,000 Copyright Strikes is Closing Their Channel

Next up today, in a very different YouTube story, Jordan Middler at VGC reports that the YouTuber behind the GilvaSunner channel has decided to call it quits after receiving more than 4,000 “copyright blocks” on his account.

The GilvaSunner account is dedicated to the music from Nintendo video games. However, The channel made headlines last week when he reported receiving some 1,300 copyright notices from Nintendo. Now those notices have been followed up with another 2,200 from Nintendo.

In an announcement on his channel, GilvaSunner has said that he is going to close the channel, or what is left of it, tomorrow.

3: Music Piracy has Plummeted in the Past 5 Years. But in 2021, it Slowly Started Growing Again

Finally today, Murray Stassen at Music Business Worldwide reports that music piracy has been in a long, slow decline due to the rise of music streaming. However, in 2021, the trend started to reverse.

The data comes from the internet monitoring form Muso, which reported that music piracy had been in a steady decline since January 2017. That decline represented a 65% decrease in the number of visits to music piracy websites.

However, in the second half of 2020, the trend started to reverse, with 2021 marking a 2.8% increase in such visits compared to 2020. The difference is largely attributed to “stream ripping” websites that allow users to download msuic from YouTube and other streaming services.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.