Woke up to an email from Blogger today, which is never a good thing. They informed me that our first episode of Marco Polo had received a DMCA takedown request from a mysterious third party.
This would be one thing, and one crisis to handle, except Marty McFlies also got a DMCA takedown from the same mysterious third party, and Blogger terminated his blog. This is a much bigger crisis.
After doing some more digging, I found both our blogs in this claim on Lumen. To make a long story short, Remove Your Media LLC (allegedly representing Crunchyroll) filed a general takedown against a lot of sites like ours for "back linking illegal Crunchyroll anime torrent sites," which is complete nonsense. He's also filed numerous other takedown requests with the same reason, which I think will probably stick at some point.
If I can soapbox for a moment, I will be the first to admit that fansubbing operates in a legal gray area. One of the ways I and other reputable fansubbers try to combat this placement in the gray area is to never work on shows licensed by professional companies. The only show of ours to be officially licensed by Crunchyroll was Minky Momo, so to have a fraudulent claim filed against us by a known copyright troll on behalf of a company that he may or may not even have the rights to represent is pretty ridiculous. If he persists with what is basically just harassment of me and others, legal action could be pursued against him.
This is not the end of Inka, even if this blog vanishes. I have control over the domain and can rehost this site in places that Eric Green's DMCA trolling doesn't have jurisdiction in.
Very sorry to hear this is happening and that it seems to be, as you say, without any real merit. Glad to hear you're not stopping due to it and I'm sorry to hear about McFlies blog.
ReplyDeleteThis is unfortunate. You and Marty both do important work in this area, preserving series that might be permanently forgotten if not for your efforts. Please keep it up!
ReplyDeleteI hope you can continue with Marco Polo, in any case if something were to unfortunately happen where else could we follow you? Do you already have a back up you can direct us to? Thanks for everything and for all your work from an Italian fan, Giuseppe from Rome
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