One Piece has been popping off online recently surrounding the momentous Gear 5 transformation as well as the, uh, “interesting” live-action Netflix series. For better or worse, the series continues to dominate news cycles. Unfortunately this week, Toei Animation has entered the party after copyright striking comedian Uncle Roger after his recent upload. Roger’s bread and butter content is reviewing cooking videos of Asian recipes through the lens of a stereotypical Asian uncle persona, and this time he thought he would review a recipe for curry depicted in episode 133 of One Piece, “A Recipe Handed Down! Sanji, the Iron Man of Curry!”. He thought wrong as Toei Animation were quick to slap that video with a strike. Based on his community post, the video will likely be taken down in the next few days to avoid the punishment to his channel.
Toei Animation is no stranger to being a strict piece of shit when it comes to people watching their series. And hey I get it, if some dude is uploading entire episodes of One Piece to YouTube with minimal added content, sure strike his ass. It’s clear they’re just trying to make money off of the property. But shit like this where it’s reviewing a recipe? From a SINGLE episode? Come on brother, take that dick out of your ass for one second and let someone make a transformative piece of content. As they should be allowed to do, legally, anyway in the first damn place. Anime content in general is pretty wild when it comes to what can be struck, but Toei takes the bar above and beyond. In 2021 they famously sent reviewer Totally Not Mark over 150 copyright claims. With that in perspective I guess this is actually a “calm” response from Toei. Fuck it though, I still think there should be a limit to how much any company can protect their properties, and shutting down reviews that feature clips of the content in question is clearly over that line. Hearing some guy talk over, edit out, and explain parts of an episode is an entirely different experience compared to streaming that bad boy uninterrupted for 24 minutes as the creators intended.
I’ll try to come back and update this article if the video somehow manages to stay up, but knowing Toei’s history I won’t be holding my breath. YouTube seems to be in no hurry to fix their copyright system already, and I assume dealing with foreign companies’ policies on copyright infringement is even lower on the totem pole. Are you familiar with Uncle Roger? Do you think Toei Animation are overstepping, or that this is a fair strike? Are you keeping up with the onslaught of One Piece news? Assemble a crew, take a bite of Gum-Gum, and look for treasure in the comments below!
UPDATE: As of 9/7 the video is still up, and Roger shared that in an incredibly rare act of second thought from Toei, they removed the strike! It's unclear if the backlash from Roger's fans or some other reason caused them to reverse the decision. This completely blindsided me. I hope it means Toei is moving in a new direction in their stance on copyright that allows for proper fair use. Good on them for now.
