KiTA
Member
So a Dragon Quest fan by the name of Saigan has posted a 101 part Lets Play of Dragon Quest X. He covers a lot of the game in the oh, 50+ hours of Lets play in there, including portions of the storyline, boss fight mechanics, et cetera.
Well, a month ago, they sent a copyright claim to Youtube, targeting his lets play. It was not an automated takedown -- they specifically targeted his first video with 100,000 views but none of the other 101 videos he has. Some have speculated it's the number of views that got Square Enix's attention.
Saigan fought the claim and then reached out to Square Enix US, who forwarded the contact over to Square Enix JP, who ignored him for over 3 weeks Then, at the last possible second, exactly one month to the day, SE Japan re-blocked the video, claiming copyright over the lets play.
What makes this worse is this makes it an official "strike" against his channel for copyright -- and Youtube allows only 3 strikes before they delete his entire channel, including years of comments, hours of video, what have you. And literally all SE would have to do is decide they wanted to claim ownership of any of his other videos at any time, his recourse is apparently to object to it, to which SE Japan only has to say "nuh uh" to get Youtube to smack it down again.
Now, a lets play is clearly fair use, so SE's copyright claim shouldn't have any merit whatsoever, but here's the bigger question -- with them having targeted a similar video a month ago (while ignoring hundreds of thousands of FFXIII-3 and FFXIV videos), is Square Enix intentionally targeting any coverage of Dragon Quest X in the West? If so... why?
Well, a month ago, they sent a copyright claim to Youtube, targeting his lets play. It was not an automated takedown -- they specifically targeted his first video with 100,000 views but none of the other 101 videos he has. Some have speculated it's the number of views that got Square Enix's attention.
Saigan fought the claim and then reached out to Square Enix US, who forwarded the contact over to Square Enix JP, who ignored him for over 3 weeks Then, at the last possible second, exactly one month to the day, SE Japan re-blocked the video, claiming copyright over the lets play.
What makes this worse is this makes it an official "strike" against his channel for copyright -- and Youtube allows only 3 strikes before they delete his entire channel, including years of comments, hours of video, what have you. And literally all SE would have to do is decide they wanted to claim ownership of any of his other videos at any time, his recourse is apparently to object to it, to which SE Japan only has to say "nuh uh" to get Youtube to smack it down again.
Now, a lets play is clearly fair use, so SE's copyright claim shouldn't have any merit whatsoever, but here's the bigger question -- with them having targeted a similar video a month ago (while ignoring hundreds of thousands of FFXIII-3 and FFXIV videos), is Square Enix intentionally targeting any coverage of Dragon Quest X in the West? If so... why?