Image: Bungie
A series of fraudulent notices to download the DMCA for Destiny 2 content on YouTube earlier this year have now grown into a $ 7.6 million lawsuit as Bungie prosecutes the alleged perpetrator in court. In addition, some content creators in Destiny 2 now say they feel “betrayed” after the person who appears to be responsible denied this during private Discord chats with them. “I feel deceived, betrayed and incredibly upset that someone we knew and trusted would do that,” Destiny’s music remixer Owen Spence wrote on Twitter. “Literally almost all of Destiny’s YouTube music has disappeared because of this.”
It’s a lot to unpack, and it started over when a bunch of YouTube videos, including some of Bungie’s own, were hit by DMCA downloads in March this year. Bungie announced that the notifications were fraudulent, and weeks later took the matter to court in an attempt to get Google to reveal the identity of the person responsible. As Bungie pointed out at the time, part of the reason fraudulent download notifications escalated in the first place was that YouTube’s copyright system was opaque and difficult to navigate (Bungie went through customer service and failed to solve the problem in days). Months later, the studio said a Destiny 2 player named Nick Minor, nicknamed Lord Nazo on YouTube, was the one claimed to be responsible based on personal information received from Google on June 10.
Minor and Bungie did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
“This case stems from Nick Minor’s malicious campaign to provide fraudulent notices to remove some of the most prominent and passionate members of this fan base, ostensibly on behalf of Bungie, in clear revenge for Bungie’s copyright on Minor material uploaded to his own YouTube channel, “the company wrote in a new lawsuit filed on June 22 in the Western District Court of the United States in Washington.
Bungie claims that Minor snatched music for Destiny: The Taken King and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen directly from the company’s official soundtracks and then uploaded them to YouTube. Despite repeated download announcements, Minor abandoned the music, which eventually led to YouTube completely deactivating Minor’s channel. According to Bungie, Minor then began posing as a third-party agency that used to enforce its copyright protection, called CSC Global, using fake gmail addresses that resembled the company’s own.
Seemingly in retaliation for the download against his own channel, Minor is said to have subsequently released fraudulent downloads against 96 other videos, including some of his apparent reciprocity in the rest of Destiny’s YouTube music scene. Bungie also accuses Minor of using the smokescreen of suspicion caused by his download series to sow distrust in Destiny’s community and to accuse legal download reports against his channel.
“Extremely disappointed to learn that Lord Nazo, a friend of ours and someone in direct contact with us about the download, is the man who released the fake DMCA download” on behalf of “Bungie,” Owen Spence, who conducts music remixes. from Destiny 2, wrote yesterday on Twitter. “[Minor] he lied to us, created a DM of Discord band with me, Promethean, Breshi and Lorcan0c and then said things like that while acting like he was a victim.
G / O Media may receive a commission
Save $ 1000
85 “class QN800B Samsung Neo QLED 8K Smart TV (2022)
Discover a summer sales event Samsung Smart TV uses a feature called Real Depth Enhancer, which can increase the contrast of foreground elements as the human eye processes the depth, making the content you watch richer than ever.
Discord’s alleged chats show Minor explaining in March how easy it is to send fraudulent downloads and suggesting that the culprit is someone who is abusing YouTube’s system. Meanwhile, a screenshot of old tweets appears to show Minor writing to Destiny 2’s community manager at about the same time that his channel was mistakenly caught in the download series, although he is said to be behind it. During this time, he also posted manifestos criticizing YouTube’s download policies due to copyright.
As Bungie points out in his case, Destiny 2 is a live service game that thrives in part as a result of the gaming community on other social platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. One area of community content is music, including looping songs, remixes, re-orchestrations, and fan covers. Spence contrasts what Minor was doing – uploading direct official copies of the soundtrack and then looping them with small audio edits – with attempts to preserve them based on in-game recordings as well as more transformative works (though it’s unclear whether Bungie agrees with this distinction). However, as a result of Minor’s obvious actions, many of the latter group were also deleted from YouTube.
As an example, the YouTube channel Promethean, Archival Mind uploads music while playing during a game. Although some of them still exist, such as the battle with First Disciple raid bosses, many others were deleted during the download series to avoid losing the entire channel. Although there are offline backups, Promethean wrote in a March update on YouTube that it would receive prior approval from Bungie directly before moving forward with future projects. On Twitter yesterday, they simply wrote, “Well … there’s a twist I didn’t expect to come…”
“[Minor’s] the decision was ultimately a terrible attempt to draw attention to a problem that led to the destruction of what he was interested in, ”Prometan told Kotaku on Twitter DM. They also said there was still an “ongoing dialogue” with Bungie about what types of Destiny music could be uploaded to YouTube in the future.
Bungie also does not take the alleged violations lightly. The studio is seeking “damages and compensation” for what it considers to be economic and reputational damage resulting from the incident. These damages include “$ 150,000 for each of the works involved in the fraudulent download notice,” for a total penalty of $ 7,650,000 plus legal fees. Just last week, Bungie won a two-time settlement of a dispute with a seller of fraud in Destiny 2. Minor’s YouTube channel, on the other hand, has less than 3,000 subscribers.
Add Comment