Capcom Copyright Clobbers Super Street Fighter IV Videos

Capcom is apparently lowering the boom on Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition videos on YouTube featuring Evil Ryu and Oni Akumfa, throwing copyright notices at anyone who posts footage of the two officially unrevealed characters.

Capcom apparently isn’t very happy with the number of Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition videos floating around on YouTube that show Evil Ryu and Oni Akuma strutting their stuff in bone-crunching, street-fighting action. The duo were long rumored to be present in the game and appeared briefly in a promotional trailer released in December, but they haven’t been officially announced yet and Capcom for some reason seems to think that it can makes people forget all about them until they’re ready to spread the word. The company has thus been throwing around copyright violation notices on YouTube, forcing the removal of most trailers featuring the two characters.

That’s annoying enough but as Edge points out, some users are getting hosed extra-hard thanks to YouTube’s policy of automatically suspending users following three such complaints, deleting their videos in the process. Street Fighter tournament player J.R. Rodriguez was caught in that particular net, losing his channel and more than 50 videos.

The two fighters were apparently unlocked using Capcom’s built-in password system, although how the passwords were actually leaked, first to Arcade Infinity in California and then to the rest of the world, remains a mystery. According to EventHubs.com, however, producer Yoshinori Ono “has taken some heat” for the situation, which he tweeted about yesterday.

I’m not much of a Street Fighter fan but I’m inclined to agree with Edge’s assessment that this is a “needlessly punitive approach to a community with which it is otherwise commendably engaged.” The genie is out of the bottle and the harder Capcom struggles to put it back in, or the louder it yells at people to stop looking at it, the more it’s going to alienate its most dedicated followers. Beating up your fans is never a good idea.