TL;DR — Blog is back under mysterious circumstances that I don't even know about. I'm taking advantage of this & continuing to post on here while I still can. All mentions of the cat site on here have been removed, too.
(Long version below)
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Those of you who have been actively keeping up with my fansub blog and its fansub releases—whether it be through Discord, Twitter, or some other means—may already know by now that this month was absolutely not a good one for me.
For context:
A couple months ago, one of the blog posts I had submitted on here for the ongoing Tongari Boushi no Memole English fansub was flagged by Blogger—they had sent me an e-mail explaining that the blog post got DMCA-flagged due to it linking to an illegal website.
For the safety of this blog, I can no longer name-drop the site name here, but it's a 4-letter site. You already know which one it is.
Anyways, the DMCA was filed by Eric Green—he manages a company solely focused on issuing DMCA notices & takedowns towards any sort of content that is seemingly infringing on copyright. Years ago he was constantly targeting people selling their own fan-made anime merch on Etsy but in recent months he's begun targeting fansub sites as well.
I've no clue if this guy exists or not—someone on Twitter wrote that when he contacted his company via e-mail to dispute one of his DMCA notices, he received an e-mail back from the company telling him to go kill himself...??
Continuing on.
My blog post for that one aforementioned Memole episode was flagged and I had to remove the link in order to keep the page up.
This is a difficult topic to argue about—not "difficult" in that it's emotionally hard, but in the "who's right or wrong" kind of sense.
Was the site I linked illegal? Technically, yes.
However, at the time of flagging, Eric was supposedly representing VIZ Media and that Memole episode got flagged due to it having been "licensed" by VIZ. Not only is that absolutely false, but Memole has never even been officially licensed here in the US in its entirety at any point since its release in the 80s, so the fact that Blogger even allowed the takedown to go into effect is wild.
I tried talking about it on Twitter to bring more awareness to this, but despite my follower count at the time of posting (3500+ followers...!!), nobody really RT'ed it and it went by unnoticed. Not saying people had to RT it like crazy but I am still admittedly a little bit shocked that nobody wanted to spread the word around & bring light to the fact that some guy was going sending false claims against fansub sites. But I digress...
The next couple of months went by smoothly—until two weeks ago, I woke up early one morning and received another DMCA flagging e-mail from Blogger—only they actually decided to delete the entire blog while they were at it. It was the result of further DMCA flagging from Eric Green, though this time he was supposedly representing Crunchyroll and flagging down posts of mine of anime that CR had the "rights" to (lol??).
The fansub uploads on **** weren't affected & this didn't change whether I could continue fansubbing or not, but I genuinely enjoyed writing out a lot of the posts of this blog—especially the ones (usually the movie fansub posts) where I go a little in-depth about how I discovered the movie or how the project came to be. They're not Orphan Fansubs-level of detailed, but still worth reading IMO. To see all of that seemingly wiped off the internet... it was, at the time, genuinely devastating.
I didn't intend on releasing any more fansubs until I got a new blog up & running and until I figured out where I could make one that'd be safe from false DMCA flagging. One of the folks from Inka-Subs offered to help set up something for me once they could figure out how to get it up & running.
Well, yesterday... someone DM'ed me asking if my "appeal" went through, to dispute this blog's takedown. Had to ask what they meant because I didn't submit anything—until they told me they asked because they saw my blog was up & running again. And sure enough: it was?!
I honestly don't know what happened. I didn't receive any e-mails telling me that my blog was back up nor if the DMCA takedowns themselves were flagged by Google due to it being partially false (sasuga, Google). In any case, the blog seems to have been restored back to the way it was.
So, what's next?
Going forward—I'm completely omitting any sort of mention of the 4-lettered feline site, as even just writing out the name without linking to the site itself seems to trigger the DMCA filters. I've went back & removed the links on past blog posts & torrent releases too, and will now resort to writing it out the same way Orphan Fansubs does on their releases:
"Find it at the usual spot."
Also, I've went ahead and backed up this blog—if the decision to bring this blog back somehow gets reversed and it's yeeted from the internet again then at the very least I can import all of this blog's posts into wherever else I decide to make the new blog from scratch.
NEVER KILL YOURSELF
