With a change in the copyright claim policies coming from YouTube, publishers have been on the warpath again, using the tools to claim copyright on let's play videos and similar content, which could severely affect many of those that make a living by creating this kind of video content. Apparently one of the corps on the forefront of the copyright war is Nintendo and today a representative named Dan responded to YouTuber UltimatePisman about the issue.

I am not a lawyer, but here's what the situation looks like to me:

I think the system is working as YouTube had designed it, and, as such, you'll need to follow the procedures that YouTube have put in place for resolving these issues as outlined in Content ID Claim Basics:

* YouTube is very restrictive about what kind of content is eligible for Content ID, and furthermore, rights holder are cautioned not to add anything to which they do not hold the copyright.

* Intellectual property loses its value if it is not defended. Hence, we chose to use Content ID.

* I would speculate that it was difficult for YouTube to design a system to automatically detect copyright infringement, but ignore fair-use claims. I would further speculate that they have heuristics in place, but the videos you've produced apparently are failing the heuristic for distinguishing fair-use from infringing.

We're not opposed to fair use (BTW, I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you whether your usage constitutes fair use), but we want to protect against infringement, and Content ID is the system that YouTube has put in place for us to use. I'm not sure we could use Content ID any differently, without weakening our ability to protect against copyright infringement.

Basically this means that Nintendo will use the tools it's given by YouTube to protect its rights against infringement, and while they're not against fair use, they don't seem to have any intention to change the way they do it.

At the moment there's no way to say how the situation will evolve in the long run, so we'll have to follow the situation closely and hope for a positive outcome.