If you're curious: Movie Studio Copyright and How they work. (Patreon)

Hi folks, so recently Crank had some copyright issues on the YT cut resulting in a lot of you unable to watch the video, the good news is that the copyright appeal has passed and the video is no longer blocked. Those of you who couldnt see it should be able to now!But we also want to take some time and give you all some information on exactly how Studio copyright claims work, so here goes: When we upload a new video, it goes through an automatic and immediate copyright check, this check takes anywhere from 10 mins to a few hours depending on the length, and it will usually come back immediately with time stamps of where the scan decides contains too much of a copyrighted material, this can be as short as 3-4 seconds of a movie clip even if we are commentating over it. However, at times long after a video has been uploaded and passes the auto copyright check, and this could be days to years, studio bots will do a secondary scan and that results in a type of copyright claim that blocks the video from certain parts of the world. Other times the claim simply results in the video being demonetized which we just leave as is, but when it blocks viewers from seeing it, we have no choice but to respond.

The first thing we do is to dispute the claim, which usually gets automatically rejected within a week or two, after which we can do an Appeal that can go 2 ways. First outcome is the appeal is outright Rejected and the video is either forcibly taken down or our channel gets a strike (like A24 did) and the video is taken down anyways, the second outcome is that the appeal is automatically granted when no responses are received from the studio after 7 days. The good outcome of no response occurs when either the studio doesnt actually care that much to spend actual man-hours on formulating an official response, or that the claim itself is falsified by scam companies and they can't actually produce any necessary legal documentation of ownership.

However, a few times in our channels history things have gone really awry such as the case with A24. When the appeal is not only rejected, but the channel receives a full strike. With YT, the first strike lingers for 90 days, where if you were to receive 2 more within those 90 days, the channel will be automatically deleted. To get to this point, the studio/publisher who made the strike has to do it manually with a person, its not something thats automated and a long form has to be filled out manually with evidence provided. During those 90 days however, we still have the right to counter claim the Strike, but this becomes a very risky procedure. In plain words, the process provides a very upfront warning that we were to proceed with this counter claim, the studio will then have a month to provide necessary legal documents to turn this strike into an actual lawsuit. If they fail to do so, then the strike is removed.

Of course no small time YT channel like ours can ever take on billion dollar companies and their legal teams, so our choices at that point is to either endure the 90 days and hope that the studio does not manually do 2 more strikes to take the channel down (which is what Ghibli did to VKunia in the past). OR, gamble on the fact that they are unlikely to actually spend billable lawyer hours in suing a channel over a video that made less than what those lawyers cost in an hour.

The caveat here is that this gamble takes a month to yield result, during which time the studio can choose to just make more strike claims, which is why when we were pending the result with A24, we took down all the A24 movie reactions. In the case of Ghibli, other channels who had to deal with this unfortunately received multiple strikes in quick succession which means that Ghibli intentionally waited until there were more than 3 reactions to their movies before doing so, giving the channel no chance to legally fight back. It is also why we will never have more than 2 Ghibli movie reactions published on YT. Patreon exclusives are an other matter and that is on the table, some day in the future. That's all! Thank you for making it this far, we like being transparent with things whenever we can and thought maybe this would be of interest to some of you. Thats it! Hope everyone's having a good week and remember, be nice to each other!