» Watch video: 5 Channels Nintendo Really Should Sue
Nintendo has struck again. They forced an entire YouTube channel to be deleted with copyright claims. Other channels would have deserved it significantly more. You can find out which channels these are and why you should avoid them in the video.
A copyright strike with sad consequences
Do you know PokéNational? If not, it’s too late. Nintendo of America sent so many copyright claims to the channel that creator Elious deleted it completely.
He animated everything himself and lovingly prepared it in the style of a nature documentary. Only the screams of the Pokémon came directly from the games, which, given their short length, should actually fall under American “fair use” law.
On the other hand, Pokémon is the intellectual property of Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Of course, you have the right to complain about fan projects, especially if they make money.
Who should it hit instead?
But the much bigger question for Nintendo is actually: Why is this channel being hit, even though others are much more clearly using Nintendo’s intellectual property for their own benefit? The success of PokéNational has inspired some copycats. But unlike Elious, these channels do not animate anything themselves, but have everything generated by an AI. Shouldn’t Nintendo take action against these channels?
From obvious to hidden: The different AI clones
The channel “NatGeo Pocket”, for example, publishes an hour-long video every day and brazenly claims in the channel trailer that it is all lovingly handcrafted – only to then describe AI as the “GOAT” (Greatest Of All Time) in the channel description. By the way, the “Pokémon Files” channel is an exact copy of it, including the identical channel trailer. You can get an insight into the videos from the channels mentioned in the video above.
The use of AI is still obvious in these channels. Others try to hide it better. “PokeDocXX,” for example, discreetly places the AI reference in the video description. The “MonBiology” channel only internally marks its videos as AI-generated for YouTube, so as a viewer you have to look very closely to notice it.
But it gets boldest when the content is not marked as AI-generated at all. An example of this is “Pokémon Nature Archives”. There you can only recognize the use of the technology by how the appearance of a Pokémon changes from one cut to the next.
It’s really sad that loving fan projects are disappearing from the platform while it is literally flooded with such loveless and automated stuff. This fate should be reserved for AI channels.