Nintendo Shuts Down Fun Faux ‘Pokemon Documentary’ YouTuber Via Copyright Strikes

We all should know by now that Nintendo is incredibly protective of its IP. When it comes to anything having to do with Pokémon specifically, all the more so. While they would tell you that they’re just protecting their IP, the end result is that some of the biggest Pokémon fans out there that just want to do some fun things that represent no harm to Nintendo get shut down by threats, lawyers, or copyright strikes.

Take the YouTube series called PokeNational Geographic, for instance. While this YouTube series has been pushing out faux nature documentary videos about Pokémon for several years, the channel behind it just got hit with a bunch of copyright strikes from Nintendo.

In a video posted to an alternate channel, Elious says that Nintendo of America suddenly issued numerous strikes on large batches of his videos, all in the space of 12 hours. At the time he posted the video, a total of 20 videos had been caught up in four separate copyright strikes which encompass the entirety of the videos. With YouTube’s three-strikes policy, this means his channel is now pending deletion by YouTube and will disappear in seven days.

Elious says the strikes claim his channel is inappropriately using “content used in Pokémon video games including audiovisual works, characters, and imagery.” Elious’ videos consist of original 3D animation of various Pokémon in the “wild,” with a David Attenborough–style narration sharing various facts about Pokémon like Magikarp, Squirtle, Magnemite, Snom, Mew, Charizard, and more. He has been producing these videos on this channel since as far back as 2023 without issue, and claims in his video that the only actual content he took directly from the games was “tiny sprite roars” that last less than three seconds, adding that numerous other Pokémon creators on YouTube, as well as AI-produced channels mimicking his own, use images or footage directly from the games with no issue.

So, why now? There’s no way to know for sure, but Elious did recently launch a Patreon account so that fans could compensate them for the series. The general speculation is that once Elious attempted to make any kind of money from his video series, that spurred Nintendo to send the copyright strikes. And for many people, that will make complete sense.

I don’t understand that point of view. Regardless of any money changing hands, this still doesn’t represent any threat or harm to Nintendo or the Pokémon franchise. If anything, fun little fan videos like this only propel interest in the product. They represent free engagement lures for fans of Pokémon. Why in the world is copyright striking this channel to hell a better option than working out a free or cheap licensing arrangement with Elious so that they can keep producing the series and Nintendo can reap some of the benefit?

Or, hell, Nintendo could have tried to have a conversation with Elious, at least.

Elious continues by saying that he isn’t opposed to just deleting all the Pokémon videos if Nintendo of America asks, but he wishes he could keep his nearly 100,000 subscribers so he can keep making videos of other things, as he has on the channel in the past.

“I can’t really fight this,” Elious says. “It all seems legitimate, it does seem to come from the actual, real Nintendo of America. I can’t fight this. I don’t…I don’t know what to do about it because it’ll remove everything. I’m downloading stuff, of course, I have like, all the videos myself. But I’ll never be able to post them again, and I’ll never be able to use this channel again. Almost 100,000 subscribers over three years of making these animations and it’s all going to be gone in seven days.”

It’s simply too bad that Nintendo would rather worship at the altar of intellectual property than get creative with how it can support its fans. Thanks to IP maximalist thought, here is just a little more fun that Nintendo has flushed down the toilet.