This time it's Kodakawa Pictures USA that has legalled up and issued cease-and-desist notices.

AnimeSuki.com, a site that does not actually host any anime but provides links to sites that do, received notices from Kodakawa demanding that they take down links to fansubs for 11 recent anime that, as yet, are not distributed in the U.S. by anyone. The links AnimeSuki collects are on the BitTorrent file-sharing network.

Kodakawa Pictures USA and parent Kodakawa Shoten are already testing file-sharing on BitTorrent, and have been selling live action films there. Perhaps they have plans to sell those 11 anime series there as well some day. But it's their deal with Google/YouTube that demonstrates how hard-line and punitive they may turn out to be, while still claiming to value the fans who enjoy their productions so much that they use some of the material to post videos on the site.

Kodakawa (and admittedly other companies as well) have spent a lot of time in the past going over YouTube, video by video by uploaded video, hunting for anything fans have put there that Kodakawa interprets as copyright infringement. YouTube is now helping companies do this in a more automated way, with a new identification system - which was in fact produced through a collaboration of Kodakawa Digix Inc and Google, and of which Kodakawa will be the primary operator from now on. If the company decides any video posted there in tribute to its shows is copyright infringement - down goes the video.

However, if the company perceives some advantage through the video and approves it, it will then surround that video with advertisements. Granted, it will share some of the ad revenue with the original uploader, so that's one good thing for that particular fan - even if this was never what the fan originally had in mind in producing his or her tribute.

You can see a March 2008 interview with Tadashi Fukuda of Kodakawa Digix Inc on the Tech-On website of Nikkei Publications, where he discusses this plan to comb YouTube for infringements, via this automated system. He does speak glowingly of fans, and claims his company does not want to discourage them, recognizing that they only post the videos because they like the shows. He also acknowledges that such uploads can be very useful, either for viewers who are simply curious and want to know what a show is about, or to others who may actually be encouraged to go looking for the rest of the series somewhere.

As Fukuda says in the interview, "Users are not uploading copied content with bad intentions. It's rather the other way around. They are supporting us and therefore, we must thank them for saving us the trouble of uploading the content. It's not like they are selling the content without permission." Rather, he says that Kodakawa merely wants to remove content that mocks the original rights-holders, and to "determine whether they are real fans or hooligans."

One would expect, then, that most of the uploaded videos would likely remain in place, since content produced by "hooligans" is surely not a majority of the anime-related videos that get put onto YouTube?

But of course, one might also expect that fansubs that host similar content are doing the same helpful promotional job that Fukuda speaks about so glowingly when he talks about YouTube.

That, however, is not what AnimeSuki has experienced. The big difference appears to be that Kodakawa can't place ads on AnimeSuki - but now it can on YouTube.