On September 6th, YouTuber Nicholas Light issued a dire warning to his 1.3 million subscribers. In a video ominously titled “My Channel will be Deleted Today,” Light accused the controversial copyright firm Remove Your Media of launching a torrent of false copyright strikes against his content. The video, which lasted 13 minutes, accused the firm’s CEO, Eric Green, of being a troll targeting creators who make reaction videos of popular anime series such as Bleach and One Piece.

Light’s video did not end the controversy, however. In a follow-up on September 8th, Light thanked his supporters for contributing to the ongoing conversation about the unfair threats to creators’ livelihoods. According to Light, over 60 of his videos had been temporarily taken down after receiving over a dozen copyright strikes, stemming from Remove Your Media’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests.

The content creators argue that their videos are fair use, but YouTube has still sent them warnings about the potential erasure of their accounts. Their videos, which feature blurred-out or altered copyrighted footage, are meant to be a commentary on the material, but the creators insist this is not enough to protect them from copyright enforcers.

Remove Your Media, in a statement, argued that the content being produced by YouTubers is not transformative enough to fall under fair use. The firm’s legal representative, Evan F. Stone, explained that while Viz Media and Crunchyroll are two of the company’s biggest anime clients, Remove Your Media reports thousands of allegedly infringing links every day. Stone also pointed out that some reaction creators use their free YouTube channels to encourage viewers to subscribe to their paid Patreon pages, which the firm believes is not a sufficient reason to review every single upload.

The debate around fair use and creator rights has sparked a wider conversation about how copyright law is applied in the age of digital content. Critics argue that firms like Remove Your Media are too quick to file takedown requests, while creators and their supporters see their videos as a form of free promotion for the original content.