Bungie has sued a Destiny participant who allegedly filed dozens of fake copyright strikes in its identify. The lawsuit, covered by TheGamePost, says California YouTube creator Nick Minor turned a single Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown discover into 96 fraudulent claims towards different YouTubers.
The complaint claims Bungie “brand protection” contractor CSC Global despatched Minor a professional copyright discover in December 2021, asking him to take away music from the soundtrack of Destiny enlargement The Taken King. Minor allegedly responded by making a Gmail account that mimicked the CSC one after which submitting related requests with a bevy of different YouTube accounts — even hitting an official Bungie account. He recognized himself as a CSC consultant and demanded the accounts take away movies or face YouTube copyright strikes.
Meanwhile, underneath his YouTube alias Lord Nazo, Minor apparently ran what Bungie calls a “disinformation” marketing campaign towards the studio. It claims he unfold studies about rampant copyright strikes, falsely blamed Bungie for overaggressive enforcement, and distributed a “manifesto” that was “designed to sow confusion” over the legitimacy of all Bungie DMCA requests. (In an editorial apart, it says the manifesto “reads like a hackneyed ‘look what you made me do’ letter from the serial killer in a bad novel.”) It quotes Destiny group members describing the takedowns as “heartbreaking” and “horrible,” saying the notices — which may have led to an account elimination, if repeated — made them afraid to publish extra movies.
“Ninety-six times, Minor sent DMCA takedown notices purportedly on behalf of Bungie, identifying himself as Bungie’s ‘Brand Protection’ vendor in order to have YouTube instruct innocent creators to delete their Destiny 2 videos,” the grievance says. “The Destiny community was bewildered and upset, believing that Bungie had reneged on a promise to allow players to build their own streaming communities and YouTube channels on Destiny 2 content.” Destiny publicly denied being behind the incident in March, and it published guidelines meant to make clear when it might request takedowns, saying it needed to “make our boundaries as a business clearer.”
The controversy garnered coverage in games media, and Bungie mentioned in March that it was investigating the problem. According to the grievance, it recognized Minor by connecting the dots between totally different e mail addresses he used over the course of the sprawling marketing campaign. It claims Minor ran the operation as retaliation for the unique takedown request, and it’s in search of monetary damages for defamation, submitting false DMCA notices, and — considerably sarcastically — copyright infringement.
Beyond Minor’s particular person actions, Bungie means that he exploited weaknesses in YouTube’s reporting system. It says he was capable of simply impersonate a CSC worker, for occasion, as a result of YouTube requires all studies to return by way of a Gmail account — not an organization area {that a} content material creator may confirm. Google’s system “allows anyone at all to claim to be representing a rights holder for purposes of issuing a takedown, with no real safeguards against fraud,” Bungie complains.
More broadly, nevertheless, Minor’s marketing campaign labored due to copyright regulation’s standing as a strong, controversial weapon that may hit YouTubers (and different web content material creators) with little warning and painful penalties. Other “copystrike” senders have used the system to extort channels for ransom or censor news, and studios like Nintendo have positioned onerous copyright restrictions on their video games up to now. Minor apparently simply went one step additional — weaponizing the backlash to the DMCA itself.
