Today, things hit the fan with the YouTube gaming community. After a recent implication of a new copyright infringement scanner, of 100s of videos of game play/content was flagged for infringement. Many of these popular videos include adept gamers playing portions of many game titles.
For many non gamers, the question on everyone’s mind is what doesn’t matter? For us in the gaming community, these videos are not only a how-to in difficult situations but they are a forums to the share common ideas and views. We have commentators similar to sports networks, and they review gameplay and yes they do profit from the reviews same as anyone that does reviews. And since the copyright will demonetize videos that these commentators, Google the owners of YouTube, received any and all ad revenue for videos played ads played during the viewing of the videosin the demonetized state.
Even though the commentators are fighting an uphill battle to reinstate their livelihood, they are not alone. Many of them have the support of their fans which total for some of them over a million subscribers. And they also have parts of the gaming industry standing behind them. In a public press release Ubisoft, Blizzard Entertainment, and Capcom entertainment, are telling YouTube to not mess with their content.
“If you’re a YouTuber and are receiving content matches with the new changes, please be sure to contest them so we can quickly approve them,” tweeted Blizzard, Creator of World of Warcraft and Diablo
Capcom wrote: “YouTubers: Pls let us know if you’ve had videos flagged today. These may be illegitimate flags not instigated by us. We are investigating.”
Ubisoft pointed out to users that take-down requests may be due to the music used in the clips, rather than the game footage.
“If you happen to be hit with claims on any of your Ubisoft content, it may be that some of the audio is being auto-matched against the music catalogue on our digital stores,” the company explained in a statement.
Another developer, Deep Silver, also said it had not called for removal of footage.
So for now we will continue to use YouTube, but if the content can not being developed and people paid for it a decent amount, the new videos will go elsewhere.
