How To: Use Anime Clips in Your Content

Are you interested in creating and sharing your own anime music videos? Or perhaps you’d like to provide commentary, reviews, or news broadcasts for your favorite anime titles on YouTube or Instagram?

This guide will help educate you on some common strategies, tactics, and guidelines that we believe can help protect you against copyright hits while helping the anime industry grow in new and exciting ways.

We believe in enabling and supporting our fellow anime enthusiasts. So, let’s get into it!

Fair Use

Though most creators aren’t at all new to this term, it’s worth providing context for newcomers to the field of anime content creation, as well as a reminder for the more experienced!

In the U.S., we have a law called “Fair Use”. What this means is that you can use content without first receiving rights, if you’ve meaningfully “transformed” it. This means that it can be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, parodies, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder.

It’s important to note, however, that even fair use can be up for debate. You might be providing commentary for an anime intro video, only to find yourself hit with a copyright strike that you can’t win under the guise of fair use. This is because at the end of the day, the courts always have the final say.

We recommend asking yourself the following questions before posting your anime content to help ensure that the original clips have been meaningfully modified.

• Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?
• Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?

Monetization

We do not recommend monetizing your videos that utilize anime clips. Monetizing could put you at risk of having your earnings taken from you at a later point, and isn’t particularly fair for the original creators who produced the anime that we all so desperately love.

We know that it’s awful to hear this, since personally we believe that your creativity and marketing for the industry deserves to be rewarded. It’s just important to note that the industry isn’t at a place yet where we can safely recommend that you go for it by monetizing your content.

Trimming Clips

We recommend trimming clips to further protect yourself. In some cases, the amount of material copied is so small (or “de minimis”) that the court permits it without even conducting a fair use analysis.

For example, we’ve seen success in using our clips in short anime music videos with various trims to allow the clip to better align with the song that we’ve decided to go with. Although there is no set duration for a clip that is deemed “safe” or “allowable” for posting, we believe that the shorter the clip, and the more frequent your trims, the safer you’ll be.

Use Scenes with Music Extra Carefully

Some anime clips have music in them. Particularly anime intro videos that everyone (ourselves included) love to jam out to!

However, intro videos are inherently riskier to post. Going back to our earlier example of commentary for an anime intro, it’s very likely that you’ll see a copyright hit on your account from Sony if you post the full intro. This is because the music scene has been one of the first to truly excel at ContentId software tracking — I.e., the software that scans your uploads on social media platforms and detects copyrighted source material.

So, if you use any clips with music in them, and you deem the music vital to the creative content that you are building, we recommend finding ways to trim or alter the sound.

However, removing the music entirely within your editor of choice is absolutely your safest bet.

Use Common Sense

When you are posting anime clips in your content online, it’s important to note that the content must not be used in an overly offensive, sexualized, or demeaning manner.

If you aren’t sure if your creation is within common sense guidelines, please contact us and we can help you out! Staying in the realm of common sense can help you remain within the guidelines of Fair Use while helping the future of anime content creation.

Allow us to illustrate with an example. If you provide a parody that’s so good that the public can never take the original work seriously again, that will directly hurt the industry that we’re aiming to help. Similarly, this sort of scarring of an anime brand could single handedly damage the future for anime content creators around the world. So please, we recommend that you use common sense in all your anime uploads.

Disclaimers — Ours and Yours

Any advice we’ve offered is opinion based — there is always opportunity for the anime industry to improve their ContentId tracking software, potentially making much of our guidance, effectively, moot.

Therefore, please use this guidance with a grain of salt. We at SUGOI Media believe in the intentions and creativity of anime content creators, so we don’t want the current state of the world to prevent your creativity from blossoming.

We’ve also decided to craft a disclaimer that you can post at the bottom of any videos that you post using anime clips. Although this will not protect you from copyright hits, we believe that it may help by offering a more sympathetic tone, and encourage the idea that you are helping the anime industry gain more traction through guiding users to legal streaming sites where the anime can be viewed.

No copyright is claimed in [anime title] and to the extent that material may appear to be infringed, I assert that such alleged infringement is permissible under fair use principles in U.S. copyright laws. If you believe material has been used in an unauthorized manner, please contact the poster.

Additionally, the full work can be legally streamed on the following streaming sites: <list streaming sites> . We aspire to support the anime industry that inspires us.

Still Not Sure?

Send us a message! We’d love to help you decide whether your creation has been edited meaningfully.

Any help we provide will be based on our opinions, and understanding of the current marketplace, — so we won’t be able to determine the final “yes” or “no”. The only entities who can truly do that are the anime license holders. However, we’ve learned a lot along the way so it’s always worth hitting us up with any questions/concerns you may have! We’d love to help you out.

Join us today as we commit ourselves to completely altering the anime industry to include its hidden heroes: anime content creators!

We want you to stop worrying, to feel appreciated by the anime industry that inspires us, to stop taking on so much risk when searching for your content, and to save time searching for the perfect clip. If this vision resonates with you, or if you’d simply like to learn more (like how to actually find anime clips), reach out to us at our website. We’d love to connect with you:)

Adventure on, anime enthusiasts!