Dracco has recently gone from not interfering with YouTube at all to issuing copyright strikes to almost every single video on YouTube with "Filly Funtasia" in the title, impressively establishing themselves as one of the most dracconian abusers of YouTube's copyright system in almost no time at all.
Following up on the limited scattershot on a few videos from a few days ago, the lads at Dracco have productively spent their Saturday systematically purging YouTube of any kind of Filly Funtasia-related fan content.
Here's a short non-exhaustive list of content that was recently taken down. If your Filly Funtasia-related video was taken down and is not in this list, please let us know in the comments.
 |
| [WR] Fandom Goodwill Obliteration 100% - 7 Days |
My co-writer Zejgar had a channel full of creative and transformative videos that should all count as fair use, which honestly wasn't promoted enough on this channel considering how good the videos were. Well, Dracco has decided that you can't view them anymore, so I hope you saw them while they were available.
Translator and long time Funtasia Daily commentator Tom S. Fox had the upload of a promo video taken down from his account.
Baltoist also had a video taken down and a strike issued.
Composers Ethan Toavs and Princess Twibug describe in comments on our previous article how their Filly music remixes got taken down. This should very clearly be fair use and did not even use any footage of the show from what I remember.
Doodlinguals also had a copyright strike issued over a video of the Filly Funtasia end credits.
"But what about you, Skundi?", one may ask. Well, they also hit my YouTube account that I uploaded Filly Funtasia promos to.
 |
| Looks like I'm banned from YouTube forever now. Oh well. |
Since I know that people who work at Dracco occasionally read this website (Hello guys!), I would like you to pause and consider the effect of what you have just done. (Assuming that this was a deliberate action by you and not some malicious action by another actor, which I think is unlikely to be the case.)
Was your purpose to stop people from uploading episodes to YouTube? Then you have failed, because even though you just issued an insane scattershot of takedowns with associated copyright strikes to almost every single piece of fan content on YouTube related to your property, I could not find a single example of a takedown being issued to an actual episode upload - instead, you somehow managed to hit everything except the episode uploads. If you search for "Filly Funtasia" on YouTube, you used to get a bunch of promos and fan content, but now it's mostly episode uploads.
Was your purpose to just not have a fandom at all by scaring people away from your franchise and keeping them from engaging in it? Well, then you've probably been more successful. I don't think many people are going to want to make fan videos about your property when they are risking copyright strikes by doing so. And I think you guys need the positive PR that fan content inevitably provides.
You have shown that you have a hard time keeping a website online. At the moment, filly.com is offline (and not just a redirect to the Filly Stars toy site which doesn't work because of a broken CDN which was the case previously), fillyfuntasia.com is offline (and not just a PNG depiction of a website), dracco.com is offline, and even the perpetually WIP dracconews.com is offline. You don't operate a single website that's currently online from what I can tell. If you google "Filly Funtasia", the only page 1 result that isn't part of some larger conglomerate like Wikipedia or TvTropes is this very website, and it's currently giving you some very negative PR, as you may have noticed.
You do not engage in social media either. The last updates to your Facebook and YouTube accounts were years ago. As far as I can tell, you did not even issue any kind of press release anywhere to announce that Filly Funtasia is now airing. The last non-fandom public mention of the show anywhere that I could find is a listing in a magazine half a year ago. The effort of fans in spreading the word is the only reason why anyone besides the small audience watching a minor Italian channel even knows that your show is out. If you keep fans from spreading the word about your show, the likely result will be that it will languish in obscurity since you seemingly lack the capability to get the word out yourselves.
I can't in good conscience encourage anyone to create any fan videos right now. Until Dracco has demonstrated that they have a reasonable attitude towards fan content, I would caution anyone from doing so, or at least from uploading it anywhere where it can get taken down. (Or for that matter, putting any type of fan content in any place where it can easily be taken down.) And I would delete or make private any Filly Funtasia-related videos that they haven't hit yet, because I don't see any reason why this copyright onslaught wouldn't continue. For the people who have had copyright strikes issued against videos that are clearly fair use (and that haven't had their accounts closed yet), I would encourage you to dispute them if you have the will and energy to do so. Dracco's lawyers need something to do besides the neverending case against Simba in Hong Kong.
