Why I Think Toei Blocking TotallyNotMark's Content Was Not Personal

Toei Animation blocked 160 pieces of TotallyNotMark's content from YouTube. I don't believe Toei was targeting him personally. My speculation is that someone at a lower level found his work, saw anime clips in it and blocked everything they could find.

Mark is a fellow content creator who covers anime and Dragon Ball like I do. We talked once in a while, and we had planned to do a documentary together about Dragon Ball down the road. I didn't know if that would still happen, but we definitely planned on it. He was still in the middle of this situation when I gave my thoughts, and I wanted to add some backstory about Toei's history of doing this.

Toei's blocks were not new to Mark or to me

Mark was not a stranger to this. He'd had a couple of his pieces blocked before, and I helped him through it. It has happened to me too, and to a lot of us. If you cover anime on YouTube, even if you do everything right and everything legal, companies can still try to copyright claim you or block your work worldwide, because the YouTube Content ID system is broken.

People were saying Toei was abusing the system, and in my view they very much were. It has been this way for a very long time, and it's not just one company. Shueisha has done it before, Nintendo has done it a lot, and a lot of the Japanese companies have done it, because their culture is very different from cultures outside of Japan.

On a personal note, Mark is my buddy and I want him to be okay. I had been working with him behind the scenes, talking to my partner manager on YouTube to try to get him managed, which would help him expedite the process. He's going to get his content back. Mark was worried, rightfully so, that it could take months, maybe years. I'm a little bit more optimistic. I could be wrong, but if things keep going the way they were, hopefully it'll be sooner rather than later. The situation drew attention from people like PewDiePie and Philip DeFranco, and attorneys weighed in on it too.

Toei's Japanese office, not its U.S. office, blocked TotallyNotMark

You have to understand there are two Toei Animation offices: one in the U.S. and one in Japan. Mark was being blocked by the Japanese office, not the U.S. one, though the U.S. office is still a subdivision of the Japanese company. The U.S. office is the one that used to copyright claim Team Four Star and Dragon Ball Z Abridged. I don't know if they still do that.

Even though Dragon Ball Z Abridged technically falls under parody, the fact that it uses Dragon Ball Z footage kind of leans toward Toei's favor. I'm not an attorney, but I do have a lawyer, and we've had long conversations, not about Team Four Star, but about fair use and what's right and what's wrong.

Why I believe Mark's work falls under fair use

What Mark does on YouTube falls under fair use. Although he uses footage and clips from anime he didn't produce, it's transformative enough. The fair use guidelines say that if it's criticism, parody or narrative, or you're explaining something or educating somebody, it's fair use. The same goes for my own work. I explain things in Dragon Ball and give my opinion. You never see me post a full Dragon Ball Z episode, because that would not be fair use.

We go in and give our thoughts on Dragon Ball, One Piece or whatever we happen to talk about. YouTube is located in the United States, so Mark, I and everybody else abide by its laws, and in theory, under U.S. law, that falls under fair use.

Why I don't think Toei targeted Mark specifically

I think Mark took this a little bit personally, and I don't blame him one bit. But it wasn't that Toei was targeting him because they don't like his opinions or don't like him. Toei is not prejudiced when it comes to who they target, because they've gone after a lot of people. I've had copyright issues in the past, and I've mentioned Team Four Star.

This is my speculation, based on what I know about Toei Animation. I know more than the average person, because I have friends who work there. My guess is that somebody at Toei, probably an intern or someone at a lower level, not a top executive, found his work, saw anime clips in it and struck everything, going down the list of as much as they could find. Mark talked about how he got claims one after another, within minutes and seconds of each other. There's no way Toei could have watched everything to see whether it was fair use. It's impossible.

When you work for a corporation that has content on YouTube, the screen you see is not what creators see. They have their own sort of dashboard for copyright claims. This Toei rep found his work and went down the list. The same thing happened to me with Shueisha back in 2018, when I almost lost my account because I got three copyright strikes.

Blocks, not strikes, meant Mark could keep working

In Mark's case he didn't get any strikes. His content was blocked. The good news was that he could still post new work and still make a living, but his older pieces would stay down until the blocks were lifted. They will eventually go back up. I'm confident of that.

I knew he was feeling bummed out, and I reached out to him once in a while to see how he was doing. It had been a crazy couple of days, with big YouTubers involved, and this was a big deal. I distinctly remember YouTube saying years ago that if companies abuse the copyright system and false flag people, they would eventually lose their right to do that. In my opinion, this situation with Mark should be enough.

My own history with Toei USA

Do I have a personal vendetta against Toei? I don't, but I've had issues with Toei in the past, and some of that is my fault. I've given away inside information about Toei before. I gave away the end of the Broly movie days before the Japanese audience even saw it, because I had exclusive spoilers. I also revealed they were working on Dragon Ball Super in 2019, which did get postponed. I got serious heat from them over that, and they're not huge fans of mine.

But that's the USA office. The Japanese office doesn't really care about the differences between creators. They just see content they think matches theirs, click it and go down the list, and that's what happened to Mark. Somebody saw his work and said, okay, let me get my quota. One commentator made a joke about them wanting to fill their quota, and unfortunately he's not entirely wrong.

Counter notifications almost always win, but 160 is a lot of busy work

If you fight a Toei copyright strike in the YouTube system, "literally 99% of the time you win." To continue, they have to tell YouTube they're going to sue you, and Toei has never sued a content creator on YouTube. Many of us have dealt with this, Mark included, and he even said so himself. So you send a counter notification saying it's fair use, and over time, it could take a month, your content comes back.

The problem in Mark's case was the scale: 160 pieces, or 120, however many it was. There was no method on YouTube to counter everything at once, so he had to go one by one. Usually Toei will deny the counter, you send another one, and that's when they'd have to send YouTube a letter, which they never do. It's not hard work, but it's a lot of pointless clicking that Mark shouldn't have to do.

Last year I gave Mark a script I use whenever I get one of these, and every time I use it, I win. He's probably using it or modifying it. It always works, but your content has to actually be fair use. If you use some clips, some footage or some panels here and there while talking over them, giving your opinion and explaining things, that's fair use by law, and we're protected by that.

Why I don't expect a lawsuit from either side

Mark isn't going to end up in legal problems. Toei isn't going to sue him, and that would be an embarrassment to the company if they tried. He can't really sue them either, because it would probably cost him more money than it's worth. He had already said he was having trouble and didn't want to lose his business, so he'd have to be really cautious about what he spends his money on. That's his business, not mine.

We're talking about a minimum of 10 grand just to begin the legal process against a corporation like Toei. It's that serious, and it's not going to happen.

I think YouTube is the real problem

Ever since YouTube got in trouble with the music business back around 2009 or 2010, it has been so scared of corporations that it always lets them get away with blocking and striking.

Mark had something like 120 blocks, not strikes, so his content was blocked but he didn't have a strike on his account, and his business could continue. Back in the day, he would have been done. Still, I feel the YouTube system needs to evolve to stop companies from blocking so many pieces at once, and to at least give us a way to batch counter them. Toei would then have to say whether they're going to sue or not, and they never do.

I'm not a fan of what Toei has become

It was a hard time for Mark, and it's scary. I've been there. I wouldn't have handled it the way he did, but it's a scary situation, and I think he will overcome it. I was really happy that the anime fandom and the wider YouTube sphere came together for this.

I'm not a big fan of what Toei Animation has become. The Toei of the '80s and '90s gave us so much entertainment, from Super Sentai to Dragon Ball to Sailor Moon to Kamen Rider. I love that stuff, and Toei is the Disney of Japan, but this is too much. Somebody at Toei needs to get an email from a YouTube executive saying they need to be really careful who they block, because they're taking advantage of the system. I know there's a cultural difference, and I don't know if it ever will happen, but something needs to come from YouTube legal so these companies know that if they really believe there's a copyright problem, they'd better make sure they're right.

This could happen to any creator

Mark was super stressed out over the holidays, and he shouldn't have been. Hopefully things would calm down and get better on his end. I'm definitely on his side. I was still talking to my people to get him managed, and I had already put him on the list of creators to be managed. Hopefully they'd do it, which would make things easier, though it would still be a pain.

Not every creator gets managed. If you have 50,000 or 25,000 followers and you're on your way up, this could happen to you. It happened to me over a single picture. It happened to another creator about two weeks before Mark's situation, and he talked to me about it. I don't know if there was malicious intent toward Mark. I think they just don't understand what this content is, and if they took two seconds to actually look at his work, they'd know. It's probably some new intern who doesn't know what they're doing.

Copyright problems are just one of the dangers of doing this for a living, the same way a construction worker could get hurt on the job or an Uber driver could get into an accident. Mark knows that, I know that, and we will overcome this as a community.

Should YouTube give creators a way to counter many copyright blocks at once?