Hi all, TL from the Undercover team here.
This might be a long post full of rage but here it is anyway.
Earlier, I posted a short post on how we have been murdered…
(Probably a bad choice of words but I have no regrets)
I was working, and had went back to work right after I posted that. After collecting my thoughts I’d just like to vent a bit here.
It happened so suddenly and it took a while for me to register what had happened. I mean, it’s a weekday. And unlike some people whose job is to prowl Youtube to find fansub channels to take down, I have an actual job. In fact, the folks over at the Seiyuu Fansubbing Community noticed our channel was gone earlier than I did.
We knew that fansubbing is not legal. It never was and for stupid reasons it never would be. Truth is, we also knew that we are going to run into a lot of problems with copyright even before we started doing this. Heck, we named ourselves “Undercover”, out of all the other Nana song titles that we could have chosen instead.
As expected, it didn’t take long before our account on DailyMotion got deleted and we had our first strike on Youtube. That resulted in us starting this mostly neglected site to house the work we have done. We also became more careful when putting things up on Youtube, and every now and then we’d still be dealing with copyright claims where we’d mute the audio for the affected parts.
That’s fine. We never monetized our translations, and never intended to do so. Getting hits like this on our channel isn’t going to hurt us financially. (It hurts bad on morale though.) We’ll just mute the affected parts to keep the video, and we can still live with one ongoing strike at a time. I’m not so entitled as to think that we’ll be safe just because we don’t make money out of it. But at least, I could proudly say that I’m not leeching off any IP for income. 自己満足 at its finest.
However, what happened today really left a bad taste in the mouth. From the GIF in the Murder post, you can see how we got the claims and strikes all at once. Worst of all, the claims were done on videos that had been uploaded ages ago. It’s as if they saw all the videos but decided they would hold back on claiming until one day they decided it’s the perfect day to launch a nuclear strike and claim everything in one go.
This means there was nothing we could do but to stare at the barren land that was our channel. Terminated due to multiple infringements, and no chance for us to see if we want to remove the videos on our own. Nope. Who cares if you have other stuff on the channel.
What frustrated me the most is how they strike the Symphogear commercials.
Imagine protecting your IP so strongly that you’d even take down COMMERCIALS.
We won’t be fighting it. There really isn’t anything to fight about. We aren’t the first fansubbing channel to be taken down like this, neither would we be the last. Blub suggested we move over to translating Vtubers instead, where we are welcomed by the official management. I have been watching Vtubers recently so that would be a good idea for me.
Well…. we won’t be doing that though. As everyone knows from the simple credits in the beginning of our videos, Undercover is a team, and I’m the only one who watches Vtubers. Being a woman of culture is suffering. Even before that, NM7.RGG is a Nana Mizuki Unofficial fanclub. So if we (I) ever do shift, it will not be “Undercover” anymore. Plus, there are so many Vtuber fansubbers out there already. There’s like more of them than Seiyuu Fansubbers for obvious reasons geez.
If there’s any silver lining to this, it would be the replies to the Murder post tweet. There aren’t many replies but just that few is enough to make us feel appreciated.
I have been talking to gekkie briefly on how/if we should continue this.
To be honest, I still have no idea what to do from here on.
Do we…
1. Work exclusively on event subs, release just the subtitle file (on Nyaa) and post it here?
(How many do come on this webpage in the first place?)
2. Find an alternative to Youtube?
(I don’t know how long that would last though. Our DailyMotion got wiped before.)
3. Another way to host?
(Does that take money? WHAT OTHER WAY IS THERE?)
4. Give up after applauding ourselves for a good run?
(._.)
Any ideas?
That’s all for my rant… It’s longer than I expected it to be but…
Do comment somewhere (here or twitter) if you have any ideas or suggestions on what we can do from here on. And… until next time maybe?
NM7.RGG Undercover 