Bungie Slaps YouTube Takedown Impersonator With $7.6 Million Lawsuit

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: Back in March, a wave of bizarre copyright strikes rocked the Destiny 2 community. Not only did it affect some of the game's biggest content creators, but also videos on Bungie's own YouTube channel. It turned out none of them had actually come from the developer but a "bad actor" impersonating two employees from the CSC, Bungie's IP protection agency of choice. Now, that person has allegedly been identified and Bungie's suing them for a whopping $7.6 million. Ouch.

Nicholas 'Lord Nazo' Minor is accused of fraudulently firing off 96 separate DMCA takedown notices throughout mid-March (thanks, TheGamePost). According to the lawsuit (PDF), Minor was issued legitimate copyright strikes in both December 2021 and March 2022 for uploading the OST for Destiny's The Taken King and The Witch Queen expansions. During that period, Minor is said to have created two separate email addresses impersonating CSC employees. He then used those email addresses to issue the false takedown notices.

The lawsuit goes on to say that during the whole kerfuffle, Minor was "taking part in the community discussion of 'Bungie's' takedowns, spreading disinformation" as well as trying to file a counterclaim with YouTube, saying the legitimate takedowns on his channel were included in the wave of fraudulent ones. Bungie claims that the situation caused "significant reputational and economic damage," with the publisher having to "devote significant internal resources to addressing it and helping its players restore their videos and channels." It claims its "entitled to damages and injunctive relief, including enhanced statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the works implicated in the Fraudulent Takedown Notice that willfully infringed Bungie's registered copyrights, totaling $7,650,000."

Can they do that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think you could sue Minors.

Re:

[Joce640k]

Even if you could, I'm pretty sure they won't have $7.6 million.

Re:

[Narcocide]

If he had only made 95 fraudulent requests he might have gotten away with it.

Broken

[NewtonsLaw]

This just shows how badly broken the DMCA is -- when someone can effectively force YT to take down content without any verification of identity or authority that they're authorized to do so.

Too many people gaming the system and too many instances where claims are made for content that the claimant doesn't even own! Here's a great example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TFESXDVdhM

Copyright, thanks to the DMCA, has become a great way to extort and deprive people from their lawful earnings :-(

Re:

[suutar]

Yeah, but this is one of the few cases that's actually likely to hit the perjury clause. This is not going to go well for him.

Re:Broken

[EvilSS]

Unfortunately you are correct. The law makes it too easy for companies to issue bad faith DMCA notices and hide behind "Well, we thought we were right". In this case it's impossible for the guy to argue that. The law needs to be changed so there is some accountability for being wrong when a "reasonable person should have known" it was incorrect. There are plenty of other places in the law where that is a standard.

Re:Broken

[DigitAl56K]

Leonard French covered the case in an episode of Lawful Masses and what stood out to me was the absolute shambles of trying to get YouTube to handle the situation.

Coverage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You want to go to about 18 mins in.

Imagine being a smaller publisher.

Re:Broken

[Areyoukiddingme]

Imagine being a smaller publisher.

You don't have to imagine. YouTube and Reddit are riddled with tales of woe from innocent victims of YouTube's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later (and NEVER answer questions) DMCA implementation. Not that YouTube's implementation is an accident. It's cheap for them and it favors the big publishers that YouTube's big advertisers like best, so it will never change.

Re:

[thegarbz]

You are wording this as if "shoot first and ask questions later" is a mistake. Youtube are riddled with tales from actual victims of abuse of power by publishers. e.g. CBS who went on a hunting spree and DMCA claimed every video that gave the Halo series a bad review. Only a bad review. It was quite funny to see the occasional good episode review perfectly fine and survive despite having 5-10min of footage in it, and then to DMCA claim the bad reviewed episodes for in some cases sub-10 second snippets.

These

It's like they say

[divide overflow]

"Fuck Around and Find Out"

Too old to know anything about this

[BishopBerkeley]

I will brag about my age by glibly confessing that, besides YouTube, I am unaware of any other character in this story.

I feel no motivation to gain awareness, either.

Re:

[SvnLyrBrto]

Bungie predates YouTube by well over a decade. So it's not age, it's pretentiousness. For you next act, perhaps you'll want to try trekking us how you never watch TV and have never had a Facebook account?

Re:

[splutty]

Not having a Facebook account isn't a result of age, but of smarts :)

Re: Too old to know anything about this

[BishopBerkeley]

I guess I had a life before YouTube, too!

They are not suing for $7.6 million

[EvilSS]

Bungie is suing him for WAY more. If you read their filing the $7.6 is from one part of one claim out of six. The $7.6 is for copyright infringement for claiming to own the Destiny IP by filing the false DMCA notices and depriving Bungie of their rights as the actual holders of the copyrights. The others are for copyright infringement for the OST tracks he uploaded to youtube, fraudulent notice under the DMCA, false designation of origin for misuse of their trademark in making the claims to Youtube, defamation, violation of the Washington state consumer protection act, and breach of contract for violation of the game's EULA (or LSLA as they refer to it).

If they were to win on all counts, the award could be way more than $7.6M.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

$7.6M is from statutory copyright claims alone (Claim 3). Bungie has asked for damages for the other 5, but they will vary in the amount that could be awarded. For example the last claim is for breach of contract in the license for Destiny 2 which could be very minor in terms of money. The fifth is for Defamation which would be very subjective at this point.

Why is the government not getting involved?

[viperidaenz]

96 cases of perjury, with what, 5 years prison time each?

Who cares who filed the takedown notice?

[ayesnymous]

If you violated copyright, then you violated copyright and deserve to have your videos taken down. Now if Youtube is taking down videos that aren't violating copyright, then that's a different issue.