Popular human voice synthesizer Vocaloid Hatsune Miku are getting known oversea as a Japanese web phenomenon. Like the global company Google picked it up as a “singer” for Chrome promotion in Japan, where they chose Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga for US.
As the Chrome video shows, there are massive number of generated songs and videos are created, uploaded on Nico Nico Douga and YouTube.
On YouTube, some Miku fans started noticing that some of the Hatsune Miku videos were removed with “copyright violation” recently. Many of the banned videos are English and other subtitled ones made from the original Japanese versions.
Nico Nico Pedia has a detailed history of the issue started in last November [J]. According to it, the users who reported the copyright violation all have a name Junichi Sasa, or slightly modified of it, who are unlikely own the copyright of the removed videos.
Fans made a video to inform this issue. The English subbed one is here,
Chinese,
French,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtvERASb6Jw
The copyright holder of the Hatsune Miku’s video is each creator, so, on regular copyright report, the original creators are encouraged to claim YouTube to get it back. However, making things difficult is that many of Hatsune Miku videos are re-uploaded from Nico Nico Douga to YouTube by non-authors, and foreign language subtitled versions are usually made another users. In that meaning, those removed videos are not really by the original copyright holder.
Even when the author does not care, or is pleased that their videos are distributed across the web services and the languages, not many of them notice and take countermeasure on those distributed versions.
A lot of these videos are back up last time I checked.