If You Have Uploaded Videos Relating to Fossilized Wonders on YouTube, Your Videos Could Get Taken Down If You Aren’t Careful

Over the past few weeks, Team Shanghai Alice’s legal team has taken down dozens of videos relating to the new Touhou Project game Touhou 20: Fossilized Wonders. Players are not happy about this, but I will explain the situation.

Touhou Project has a thriving community that makes fanworks, and is one of the reasons for the franchise’s popularity. This week, things all changed unfortunately. Users who uploaded original songs that would predict the future of the game found themselves in a nasty situation with Team Shanghai Alice. This also included users who uploaded the game’s soundtrack on YouTube.

Out of nowhere, players began to see their videos get taken down by Team Shanghai Alice, all for simply using the game’s name or even soundtrack uploads. It is understandable that the full game isn’t out yet, and the videos taken down like in the image above constitute pre-release piracy. Pumpkinpielex, Kafuu Hearn, and Wearr are three victims who lost their videos because of this.

The list may go on and on, comprising hundreds or thousands of lost videos. Users may have had to privatize their videos to prevent their channel from being terminated. This may even include big-name YouTubers. You could lose your entire channel in just a day, and this happened to Kafuu Hearn. For me, I have not uploaded any videos relating to the game, and I have not decided to make videos on the game because of this risk.

Why were they taken down, you may ask? As I said, pre-release piracy ruins the experience for other players. That technically goes against Team Shanghai Alice’s rules relating to using Touhou Project content in derivative works. They technically had every right to lay down the law (or bring in Phoenix Wright) and scrub the videos from the site.

There’s one thing these takedowns have in common. It’s not coming from RightsScale, which administers the rights for the soundtracks of the official games, but Team Shanghai Alice’s legal representative. In short, both TSA’s legal rep and RightsScale can be used to take down videos on YouTube. Some of these takedowns are being done by accident. There are creators who are still fearing they could lose their entire channel over one or the other.

Behind the scenes, they could be taking down videos, channel merch, fanworks, and even entire fangames that may appear to use assets ripped directly from Fossilized Wonders. Frankly, this is not the first time Team Shanghai Alice had content taken down from YouTube.

It is understandable that Team Shanghai Alice isn’t some big corporate monster unlike Nintendo or other mass media giants who draw from the anti-piracy resources from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) to destroy their community because they felt like it. Even huge companies can make mistakes or have misunderstandings of the Fair Use exemption, except in Japan where it is not codified into their Copyright Act due to a strict interpretation of copyright law.

These videos are what make up the Touhou Project community. The series blew up in popularity in the West thanks to the Bad Apple!! shadow art video. For a lot of people, they have turned YouTube into a full-time job. Even a tiny accident that leads to huge impact can be serious. You deserve to know about this, so please be careful. Even ZUN understands that he doesn’t want to see innocent creators who abide by the guidelines be treated like this.