>>63297310On the evening of July 29, 2020, Capcom copyright struck two of Mio's VODs, both capcom games for the Nintendo DS. She had used a modified system in order to stream her copies of the games to her viewers. In the two and a half years of Hololive's existence, this had never happened before. A third strike against Mio's channel would have meant termination, and the end of Mio's career.
Panic swept through Cover's offices, as they had now finally realized that yes, Japanese copyright law also applies to them, and they had never bothered to get permission from game companies to stream their games.
The holoCaust was upon us.
The violence was swift and indiscriminate. It didn't matter how old the channel was, which talent it belonged to, or what kind of video it happened to be.
Everything was gone.
Everything.
Within hours, every hololive channel was left completely bare. The only thing remaining were playlists full of countless privated videos. Holomen rushed to twitter to try and assure their fans that what was happening was just temporary and that many videos would be unprivated once they were determined not to contain any copyrighted material that Cover didn't own. With sunken hearts, many fans replied positively to these messages, but deep down, everyone knew better. Cover didn't have the manpower or will to watch the roughly 12,500+ VODs that had accumulated over time. Even in the best scenarios, everyone instantly recognized that most of Korone's playthroughs of obscure retro games were never coming back.
Over the next day, some old videos began to slowly return to their channels. Of Roboco's 900 privated VODs, a handful of them had been unprivated already. Many of the original songs the girls had made over the years started to reappear as well. Fubuki herself spent the entire day and night watching her old VODs non-stop and unprivating any videos she was allowed to bring back. Hope was beginning to come back.
But then they discovered Subaru.
On the morning of July 30, 2020, the mutilated body of Subaru's channel was discovered in the dumpster behind Cover's offices.
Every hololive manager had been instructed to private all videos on their talent's respective channels out of caution. But there had been an error in communication or judgement.
Every single one of Subaru's VODs dating back from her debut in 2018 up to January 2020 had been mistakenly deleted by her own manager.
To this day, Subaru remains the only talent in Hololive without access to their debut stream and if you go to her channel right now, the earliest video is still from January 18, 2020.
Over the course of the next few days, Yagoo announced that he would dramatically cut his own salary in a gesture of good will. Meanwhile, feeling responsible for everything that had happened, Mio announced on twitter that she would be taking a 3 month break from her channel until the strikes fully resolved, the longest that had ever been seen in hololive up to that point.
Overall, the damage had been immense. Of the estimated 12,500+ videos privated that day, only a few thousand were ever brought back. Most of the work of watching their old VODs were left up to the girls themselves, and most of them didn't have the time or energy to scour through thousands and thousands of hours of recorded content. And of course, ever since this happened, Cover has required every holo to obtain explicit permission for the games they stream which has limited what they can play and when they can play it.
Up until this point, for the many people that started watching hololive in early 2020 because of Covid, nothing that bad had really happened with regards to hololive yet. The worst thing that had occured up until then, was the situation with Mel's manager.
This was most people's first major upset with hololive. And throughout the entire catastrophe, we kept being reminded of one thing:
nothing lasts forever
