The Pokemon Company Just Killed Another Great Pokemon Fan Project

The Pokemon Company is pretty well known for being aggressive when it comes to its intellectual property, even if it means lodging a strike against its very own fans. And that’s precisely what has happened overnight, with the YouTube channel for Pokemon Reorchestrated — remixed orchestral scores of Pokemon music — being terminated at the company’s request.

Image credit: Pokemon Reorchestrated Kanto Symphony Kickstarter

The saga kicked off earlier this month when Braxton Burks uploaded videos of Kanto Symphony to the Pokemon Reorchestrated YouTube channel. The Kanto Symphony was a crowdfunded project to produce orchestral scores based on the Pokemon music that began in 2011, and the orchestral covers had been made available on Spotify in January.

Despite getting the approval of the original publishers for Kanto Symphony — a requirement before the music can be listed on services like iTunes, where the album is still available for $16.99 — that didn’t stop someone from The Pokemon Company from filing two takedown notices to have the videos deleted.

It was on February 8 that Burks voiced his fears of what was about to come:


Fast forward a week to another takedown notice from The Pokemon Company. The strikes had tallied up and, despite Burks saying that the corporation had not issued any reasons or pinpointed what part of the offending material was copyrighted, that was enough for YouTube to take down the channel entirely.


The YouTube takedown hasn’t affected the music’s availability on other platforms and he added that the music was “100% legally licensed”. “Not knowing what I did wrong — having my licensed music removed from YouTube without an explanation — left me feeling disheartened and disillusioned by a company that’s currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of the original Pokemon games.”

“It’s hard to feel included in that celebration,” Burks added. Fans are also speculating that the takedowns could be related to The Pokemon Company’s intentions to release their own material on or around February 27.


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