Naruto Fans, Blaming YouTube

Though there have been no news reports of YouTube taking down episodes of the anime series Naruto, one of our college correspondents noticed what's going on. And this morning, the only Naruto on YouTube seems to be fan-created tribute type stuff.

This is from our DFNG correspondent Nicole Norfleet:

Sometimes after a long, hard day of work, I like to plop down in front of my laptop with a can of root beer and enjoy what I believe to be Japan's greatest export - anime. Last fall, I discovered I could use YouTube to catch anime episodes and movies never before released in the states. True, many of these full-length clips were in Japanese and dubbed in English, but that made them all the more cool.

Alas, those were the good ole' days. Now I'm lucky if I can find complete episodes of Naruto. (I admit to secretly watching a kids' cartoon.) It seems that under the cover of darkness, YouTube cronies are deleting anime episodes in hopes to win the never-ending war against copyright infringement.

Some anime enthusiasts have been so distraught about the disappearance of episode segments that they are repeatedly posting comments in hopes of starting some sort of "movement:"

STOP YOUTUBE!!! For your information, Youtube is getting rid of all Anime videos. Every night at 10:00p.m. they have a maintenence that deletes any videos that are Anime...To stop Youtube from doing this, You need to get enough people to Protest...To do this, please help by Copying and Pasting this message to all of the Anime Videos from being deleted STOP YOUTUBE!!!

I don't know if I have any faith in a revolution headed by people who can't perform a simple spell check to correctly type "maintenance," but that's just me. Fight the power, my little geeky comrades.

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