In what has been an annoying turn of events for everyone (and believe me, I've seen all of your messages) I've had to make all of the videos on my YouTube channel private. And since YouTube has been my primary method of distribution, this has pretty much crippled MaruChanSubs for the moment. I'm going to lay out some background for what happened and then discuss what steps are going to come next.
One of the things that motivated this subtitling project was noticing the prevalence of Chibi Maruko-chan videos that exist and continue to exist on YouTube. Since I was new to the whole fansubbing thing, I figured this would be the simplest way to distribute the subtitled videos so the largest number of people could watch. Once I started uploading videos to the service, they would immediately get monetized by Nippon Animation, the makers of Chibi Maruko-chan. This by no means meant that I was permitted or authorized by them to do what I was doing, but I figured it sort-of nudged things into a grey area, one where I could happily exist on my own as long as the wrong people didn't find out what I was doing.
Well, things change. I have my suspicions as to why the attitude changed, but I'll spare you folks from them unless you're really desperate to know. What happened first is that the live-action episode I translated last year to celebrate 1000 subscribers was hit by a copyright strike in the middle of June. This had nothing to do with ContentId or any algorithm -- this was a manual takedown request by Fuji Television. That was fair enough, the only monetization on that video was due to Odoru Pompokolin playing in the beginning credits, so nobody who actually made the show was getting a cut. Getting a one-off wiped from the channel wasn't a huge deal, since all it really meant was that I wouldn't have to bother finishing the translation for the 2nd live-action episode. As long as the actual animated episodes themselves weren't causing any grief, things could continue as normal.
Fast forward to a few Wednesdays ago where I'm out visiting with friends when out of the blue I get an email telling me that Episode 57 has been taken down due to a copyright strike. And here's the kicker -- the takedown wasn't issued by Nippon Animation. Instead, it was issued from some inscrutable Japanese broadcasting bureaucracy called A-PAB or the Association for the Promotion of Advanced Broadcasting Services. (I'm imagining they're acting on behalf of some other vested interest who would prefer to remain unnamed, but who can really tell with these things.) That pretty much put a damper on the rest of my evening, as you can imagine. With two copyright strikes on the channel already, the next one meant the shutdown of my channel, and with some group picking off videos randomly it was only a matter of time before the channel crashed and burned. So, I had a choice between leaving everything up and waiting for the axe to fall which would have left a bunch of subscribers with no idea about what happened, or I could wipe out everything and leave some way for my regular viewers to find out where they could go to get more episodes. As you're all aware of by now, I went with the second option.
This has been pretty frustrating for me as well as you -- I know I don't really have a legal leg to stand on as I was distributing copyrighted materials, but the fact remains that there's several intact uploads of Episode 57 to YouTube that have yet to receive takedown notices, so I'm confused as to why I was specifically targeted for it, unless they took down one random video to send a message. Regardless, it is what it is and now it's time to start thinking towards the future.
As of this moment, MaruChanSubs is falling in line with literally every other fansub group out there by primarily doing its releases through torrents. After catching up with the batch torrents to get up to Episode 60, every episode thereafter will be released primarily via a torrent. Getting the batch torrents up to 60 will take a bit, so unless I decide to go down a different route in the future, work on new episodes will stop until the batch torrents have caught up.
This doesn't mean I'm entirely abandoning streaming, however. Since the channel is still intact, once the copyright strikes have been removed from the channel I'll begin uploading there again. (Unless the corporate overlords start cracking down on Chibi Maruko-chan on YouTube entirely, of course.) Here's the kicker, though -- I'm only going to store a couple of episodes at a time there. Once a new one comes up, the oldest one has to come down. So in effect, episodes will be rotating. I realize this is far from ideal, but I'm really trying to balance accessibility and the possibility of the hammer falling and crushing everything here. Not everyone has the knowhow or even the ability to access torrents, nor can they easily find the anime streaming sites that aggregate the content of those torrents. In a perfect world I would like to make it so everything was streamable, but them's the breaks.
Thanks a bunch for your patience during this unfortunate hiccup!
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