Case Study: YouTube ‘Blackout’ in Japan

Users in Japan, for a while, may have seen this YouTube message way too many times when attempting to view anime-related videos and other content from overseas:

This video is not available in your country due to a copyright claim by (rightsholder). However, YouTube has made it available in the United States, as part of an initiative to protect fair use. Learn more in the YouTube Copyright Center.

This barrier started in 2021 when YouTube got into an unprecedented copyright standoff with Toei Animation and other companies represented by the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), and the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC). Their equivalents in the United States are the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the American Society for Composers and Publishers (ASCAP), who also perform similar rights management.

How many videos have been censored in Japan as a result of this? According to one study conducted by Drillimation, the top thirty most-viewed videos in Japan are all playable.

The blackout by Japanese companies is not technically censorship. Google had to block these videos in the country instead of paying a per-view fee solicited by those companies for the use of their material. This conflict could lead to a lawsuit in Japan alleging that YouTube committed vicarious acts of infringement in Japanese courts.

Meanwhile, YouTube users from overseas have accused companies of not giving them the freedom to comment, criticize, study, or report on topics associated with anime. This also fueled ongoing discussions in Japan from the subject of copyright in the digital age and that they are still stuck using 20th century copyright doctrines.

Many companies simply don’t understand how Western copyright rules work and control it using their own native rules. In the face of regulation, users are apparently not willing to pay in fees in order to not be regulated, likely due to the expensive costs that are incurred. Google does what publishers say about expected payments from what users publish on YouTube.

The situation has also led to increased competition on other sites popular with Japanese. In the past, YouTube was not nearly as important in other countries and whenever a YouTube link doesn’t work, they would flock to NicoNico or Bilibili. Users’ media choices drive the world wide web, and copyright law makes it easy to get stuck.