I mean the whole point of this is that Yamanbasanji seemingly continues to be incompetent/indifferent/negligent with their EN branch.
So being that late is very on-brand.
"I'm fine! I'm not fine! Fuck you!"Sakamata Chloe
Graduation of Pomu Rainpuff
- Thread starter Awoogers
- Start date
I mean the whole point of this is that Yamanbasanji seemingly continues to be incompetent/indifferent/negligent with their EN branch.
So being that late is very on-brand.
They initially said everything will be privated, despite her at the same day on stream saying otherwise. I wouldn't put it past them attempting to do some sneaky switcheroo in hopes she won't notice just as a final fuck you. And it almost worked. You know, just the usual Nijisanji EN thing
So I have a question: how hard is it to actually get permissions to release a song cover commercially? Over at Phase Connect, Rie's regularly releasing covers of modern JP stuff from various sources, (which also get released on music streaming services), Lumi's doing plenty of covers, and the other talents are occasionally doing stuff too. Other corps do their song covers too. Since they're being released commercially, and being used in advertising, they presumably have the same legal restrictions that Nijisanji talents are required to adhere to. Is there any legitimate reason why Niji is finding it difficult to release covers while other corps don't?
No. It depends 99% on a specific artist/label how easy it is to do. The reason Ado, Kanaria and other popular groups are covered so frequently is they give blanket permission to cover their songs with no strings attached. Vocaloid generally falls into the same category too. The issues start when you begin involving multiple people, as they will all start bitching about revenue share and it can go on for months, or the song in question is published under retarded label. God bless laws in that area, because they can at any point in time just go and remove permissions they gave before, even the ones explicitly given in a form of written contract. So unless you want to cover songs from labels you know are chill and don't do this kind of things, your parent company can spend ungodly amount of time trying to make at least somewhat sure the label won't fuck you over
My real question is how the fuck does niji sucked even on original song. 2 years of delaying an original is wild.
Also everything points at niji being understaffed imo.
Tbh Phase is, as much as people cope about, too small for music corpos to give a shit about. They will have to go on major overhaul on perms shit once they are actually touched. Same as any Western orgs.
They're releasing the music as a commercial product - they're using it for advertising talents, and Hime's even put her stuff on various music streaming services. They might be using stuff easy to get permissions for, as previously stated, but I'm certain that Fishman is doing the work to get permissions, rather than unnecessarily exposing himself to huge commercial liabilities by stealing other people's music.
Smaller, less exposed corp. You don't need to ask for permission if you don't monetize it either, which they may not. (don't know I use adblock) Also with copyright claims on YouTube these days the original owner will often just claim a revenue split of the material instead of shutting it down. It may not be as big of an issue to Sakana and the girls as with a larger corp like Niji or Holo. Not to mention they don't put as much money into them. Lumi's videos are mostly her avatar bouncing along as she sings.
WIsh i could believe music companies don't take down "too small" creators but it sounds like a dream. At least game osts get taken down regardless of how small the channel is when found.
Still, Niji should be more than capable of dealing with perms. They arent that small compare to Hololive(E:seems they are actually bigger. Which makes it worse imo) and while people here may not like them much, dont think music labels share the same opinion. It may be another case of not putting enough effort.
Still, Niji should be more than capable of dealing with perms. They arent that small compare to Hololive(E:seems they are actually bigger. Which makes it worse imo) and while people here may not like them much, dont think music labels share the same opinion. It may be another case of not putting enough effort.
They will eventually notice if there is a perms issue, especially now since they have a playlist of all covers under Phase Music channel. The only possibility is that they dont monetize them(E: it seems that may not matter after all), but I'm certain Heart challenger by Saya has ads, is noticed by Kiara as well, so I assume at least other Hololive covers also have them. Most likely they just pick songs with easy perms or no perms needed. Phase music probably will do songs that require perms and deal with them properly in future
Last edited:
This isn't how copyright works. The person that creates an original piece (in this case, music) has exclusive rights to use or distribution of their work, the length of which depends on the jurisdiction. In Japan, it's seventy years after the death of the author, or for a corpo, seventy years after an item is released to the public. There are exceptions that allow you to use copyrighted works (such as criticism, education, and parody) but the fact that you're not making money off something isn't one of those reasons.
Count on Yakub to bring enlightnment
Freindly reminder, that "fair use" not only is only applicable to USA, and majority of other countries don't give a flying fuck about it. It's also a list of requirements you must fulfill, not the list of requirements that if you follow automatically grants it a status of fair use. You have to go to court to prove that it was a fair use first, then a court might decide it was. The whole "it's ok to use copyrighted material if you are not making money off of it" is such a load of horseshit it's impressive how widely it is spread and how many people believe in it. It's just the most basic rule that almost everyone manage to fuck up and nearly impossible to prove you didn't get monetary gain. Cover wasn't monetized - if it has more than zero views and your channel got more than zero subscribers this day - have fun trying to prove it didn't increase your channel revenue overall, therefore making you money
Phase isn't a JP Corp so JP laws don't really matter. They can strike it down in Japanese region specifically if they want but it won't matter on YouTube in any other region. This happens literally all the time with millions of videos.
Thinks Youtube's claim system is the same as the law.
Thinks that Japan's copyright law is irrelevant and it's Canada's copyright law that counts, and isn't aware that the two are near-identical.
Also isn't aware that copyright law is subject to international treaties, so being in another country isn't actually a shield against copyright infringement.
It's really impressive how completely wrong you've managed to be about this. Congratulations.
You can go on and on about copyright law all day long if you want but we're talking about how Phase is fine releasing covers whatever they want for covers on YouTube when Niji isn't. Not about what is and isn't legal. At the end of the day copyright on YouTube has never been applied consistently so it doesn't really matter.
A company releasing whatever they want for covers is pretty counterproductive even if they don't somehow get taken down. Eventually you will grow, and they will notice, and then not only they will take it down, perms issue will become infinitely harder, if they don't simply decide to never give any perms.
The creator of a work has most of its rights. However, there are four major layers of fuckery here.
The first is that most music has multiple creators. Someone wrote the lyrics. Someone else composed the melody. Someone else arranged the instrumentals. Someone else performed the original work. And yes, each of those people has individual rights to the parts they created unless they sign them away. That's why Cover uses Karafun for karaoke rather than random youtube backing tracks, because Karafun licensed the melodies and performed them with different background musicians and singers, therefore bypassing the need for many of the individual licences. That's also part of the reason why when you look at a copyright claim on YT there are like seventeen different rights holders.
The second layer of fuckery is licensing, or signing away the original creator's rights, usually to a record label. Most artists have zero idea what they've actually signed away. Others are unaware that even if they have kept control over certain rights, others who participated in the creation of the work may not have. Furthermore, each facet of copyright can be licensed out separately, such as distribution ("mechanical"), performance, the right to the master (the recording), etc. There's no law that states how these types are divvied up, they're just shorthand the music industry uses to confuse people. Some artists will retain certain rights, but not others, and may not be aware what they don't have. One interesting facet that a rights holder who really wanted to fuck over a YouTube cover could use is the synchronization license, which is the right to use/play the music accompanied by a video. Synch licenses were designed for things like TV shows, and they can run in the hundreds of thousands if you can even contact the rights holder for them in the first place, but the totally do apply to YT videos.
So creators sign their rights over to record labels, which are owned by larger companies, which then subcontract out control over copyright to music rights societies, or to subcontractors who act as their agent on sites like YouTube. Often these rights societies only control a part of the work, for example, there are rights societies who claim on their website that you totally need to pay them to license a work, but they only control the lyrics to that work.
The third layer is international rights. Copyright is by country, and if a rights holder doesn't operate in a country they are typically unable to enforce copyright in that country easily. The laws on copyright will vary from country to country too, stating exactly what can be copyrighted, what is legal to sign away, what automatic licenses are granted, how to enforce that copyright, how to enforce that copyright online, etc. And the ownership of rights is also different from country to country. The rights to foreign music in America for example are usually signed away in bundles by the foreign owner to American music companies who distribute and control the music there, but a lot of Japanese and (in times past) Korean music goes unlicensed in the US. That doesn't mean a foreign company doesn't own the copyright to its creations in the US if it doesn't have a US partner, it just has difficult enforcing it. This is how fansubbed anime got away with it for so long, for example. However, the other part of this is even if the original creator gives you a license, American companies may not recognize that license, or their enforcement actions may not have ways to deal with your license.
And finally, the fourth and most important layer is how YouTube chooses to administer copyright on its site. Basically absolutely zero of the above matters outside of the courts, because there is little recourse when a platform decides it wants to do things a certain way.
As part of an American company YouTube and a hosting platform under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube is required to provide a specific system for DMCA takedowns lest it wants to get sued for all the copyrighted content on its site. YouTube has then extended this system to international creators outside American jurisdiction too. In YouTube's system this means the rights holder submits a takedown request, the video is removed, and a copyright strike is applied to the creator's account, with an appeals process that satisfies the letter of the DMCA.
But YouTube also has a system to bypass this, called copyright claim, which is different. In a copyright claim, YouTube pulls from a massive library of copyrighted material it's been asked to enforce, and automatically detects copyrighted material, usually by the material's audio (with a fair number of false positives). It can then apply a number of automatic actions, the most common of which is directing the money from the video to the rights holder. It can also block the video in the rights holder's jurisdiction. Note that automatically detecting the audio often does not consider all these various splits of rights that copyright principles say a creator has, which can get fucky wucky with no real recourse. The "correct" way to protect your content from being claimed is to ask the rights holder to be whitelisted, usually by purchasing a license from them. YouTube will still auto-detect the copyrighted content, but if you are whitelisted in that jurisdiction, will not perform enforcement actions.
Laymen will refer to these two both as copyright claims, when the first is actually a takedown into a copyright strike.
Now... all that sounds like a supreme basket of bullshit, and it is, but there are a handful of things you can do:
For one, in some jurisdictions there are comprehensive licensing bodies like JASRAC, which for Japanese creators make it easy to determine what rights they can easily obtain, grouped into convenient categories like posting a video. However most jurisdictions and especially NA doesn't have anything so clean to go by.
For two, even in 2024 it is absolutely possible to fly under the radar by ignoring most or all of the above when creating content that someone else has the rights to. Possibly you just don't bother entirely, possibly you only focus on the areas that are likely to be enforced, like getting whitelisted by whoever is detecting the music on YT's claim system. I want to emphasize, most YT creators do not even bother to engage with obtaining rights. At best they rely on defenses like fair use if they get enforced against, or have rights such as performance rights that likely don't apply to the type of content they are producing.
For three, if you know where to tread there's some music that's easier to deal with. The easiest would be something like vocaloid, which has never been signed to a record label, or if it has, has never been licensed outside Japan, and was created by one guy only, with no singer, no separate lyrics writer, etc. But even with pop music, there are some songs, artists, labels etc that are just easier to deal with. If you look at Phase's covers, you will see that YouTube has in fact auto-detected most of them. It's an open question to me whether Phase is still getting the money for these (eg. been whitelisted) or not, but they are certainly engaged with YT's copyright system in some way.
The first is that most music has multiple creators. Someone wrote the lyrics. Someone else composed the melody. Someone else arranged the instrumentals. Someone else performed the original work. And yes, each of those people has individual rights to the parts they created unless they sign them away. That's why Cover uses Karafun for karaoke rather than random youtube backing tracks, because Karafun licensed the melodies and performed them with different background musicians and singers, therefore bypassing the need for many of the individual licences. That's also part of the reason why when you look at a copyright claim on YT there are like seventeen different rights holders.
The second layer of fuckery is licensing, or signing away the original creator's rights, usually to a record label. Most artists have zero idea what they've actually signed away. Others are unaware that even if they have kept control over certain rights, others who participated in the creation of the work may not have. Furthermore, each facet of copyright can be licensed out separately, such as distribution ("mechanical"), performance, the right to the master (the recording), etc. There's no law that states how these types are divvied up, they're just shorthand the music industry uses to confuse people. Some artists will retain certain rights, but not others, and may not be aware what they don't have. One interesting facet that a rights holder who really wanted to fuck over a YouTube cover could use is the synchronization license, which is the right to use/play the music accompanied by a video. Synch licenses were designed for things like TV shows, and they can run in the hundreds of thousands if you can even contact the rights holder for them in the first place, but the totally do apply to YT videos.
So creators sign their rights over to record labels, which are owned by larger companies, which then subcontract out control over copyright to music rights societies, or to subcontractors who act as their agent on sites like YouTube. Often these rights societies only control a part of the work, for example, there are rights societies who claim on their website that you totally need to pay them to license a work, but they only control the lyrics to that work.
The third layer is international rights. Copyright is by country, and if a rights holder doesn't operate in a country they are typically unable to enforce copyright in that country easily. The laws on copyright will vary from country to country too, stating exactly what can be copyrighted, what is legal to sign away, what automatic licenses are granted, how to enforce that copyright, how to enforce that copyright online, etc. And the ownership of rights is also different from country to country. The rights to foreign music in America for example are usually signed away in bundles by the foreign owner to American music companies who distribute and control the music there, but a lot of Japanese and (in times past) Korean music goes unlicensed in the US. That doesn't mean a foreign company doesn't own the copyright to its creations in the US if it doesn't have a US partner, it just has difficult enforcing it. This is how fansubbed anime got away with it for so long, for example. However, the other part of this is even if the original creator gives you a license, American companies may not recognize that license, or their enforcement actions may not have ways to deal with your license.
And finally, the fourth and most important layer is how YouTube chooses to administer copyright on its site. Basically absolutely zero of the above matters outside of the courts, because there is little recourse when a platform decides it wants to do things a certain way.
As part of an American company YouTube and a hosting platform under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube is required to provide a specific system for DMCA takedowns lest it wants to get sued for all the copyrighted content on its site. YouTube has then extended this system to international creators outside American jurisdiction too. In YouTube's system this means the rights holder submits a takedown request, the video is removed, and a copyright strike is applied to the creator's account, with an appeals process that satisfies the letter of the DMCA.
But YouTube also has a system to bypass this, called copyright claim, which is different. In a copyright claim, YouTube pulls from a massive library of copyrighted material it's been asked to enforce, and automatically detects copyrighted material, usually by the material's audio (with a fair number of false positives). It can then apply a number of automatic actions, the most common of which is directing the money from the video to the rights holder. It can also block the video in the rights holder's jurisdiction. Note that automatically detecting the audio often does not consider all these various splits of rights that copyright principles say a creator has, which can get fucky wucky with no real recourse. The "correct" way to protect your content from being claimed is to ask the rights holder to be whitelisted, usually by purchasing a license from them. YouTube will still auto-detect the copyrighted content, but if you are whitelisted in that jurisdiction, will not perform enforcement actions.
Laymen will refer to these two both as copyright claims, when the first is actually a takedown into a copyright strike.
Now... all that sounds like a supreme basket of bullshit, and it is, but there are a handful of things you can do:
For one, in some jurisdictions there are comprehensive licensing bodies like JASRAC, which for Japanese creators make it easy to determine what rights they can easily obtain, grouped into convenient categories like posting a video. However most jurisdictions and especially NA doesn't have anything so clean to go by.
For two, even in 2024 it is absolutely possible to fly under the radar by ignoring most or all of the above when creating content that someone else has the rights to. Possibly you just don't bother entirely, possibly you only focus on the areas that are likely to be enforced, like getting whitelisted by whoever is detecting the music on YT's claim system. I want to emphasize, most YT creators do not even bother to engage with obtaining rights. At best they rely on defenses like fair use if they get enforced against, or have rights such as performance rights that likely don't apply to the type of content they are producing.
For three, if you know where to tread there's some music that's easier to deal with. The easiest would be something like vocaloid, which has never been signed to a record label, or if it has, has never been licensed outside Japan, and was created by one guy only, with no singer, no separate lyrics writer, etc. But even with pop music, there are some songs, artists, labels etc that are just easier to deal with. If you look at Phase's covers, you will see that YouTube has in fact auto-detected most of them. It's an open question to me whether Phase is still getting the money for these (eg. been whitelisted) or not, but they are certainly engaged with YT's copyright system in some way.
Niji is bigger than Holo in every way except overseas popularity and has been since the founding of both agencies back in 2018/2017 respectively.
It's also possible for those with access to the system to do it manually. I have no idea who all has access and how you obtain it (I'm not even monetized, so I'm obviously limited to DMCA takedowns), but I have seen it used manually.
Even just singing someone else's song to my guitar without obtaining the proper permissions would be copyright infringement, if I were to upload a recording or publicly perform it
Similar threads
