Bungie sues the people behind several fakes Destiny 2 DMCA removed.
In March 2022, Bungie and various YouTube users were taken down by the DMCA. At the time, it was unclear who issued the takedown order, but Bungie eventually found out who the perpetrator was and filed a lawsuit.
According to the documents, the perpetrator is named Nicholas Minor, who goes by the name of Lord Nazo on YouTube. Apparently, Bungie sent Minor a takedown notice on YouTube, then went off track and ended up targeting Bungie and the famous Destiny YouTubers.
“After receiving the takedown notice, Minor kept his infringing video for as long as possible – until YouTube removed it in late January 2022 – and instead created a new Gmail address designed to mimic CSC for Bungie’s legal Grammatical removal of email addresses,” the lawsuit reads.
“In February 2022, he purchased and uploaded multiple tracks from another OST – this time, for Bungie’s latest release, The Witch Queen. When Bungie asked CSC to slap the second infringement on his channel and other Minor took action when the infringing video was sent for DMCA takedown. He registered a second fake ‘CSC’ email address and began sending a wave of fraudulent takedown notices.”
Ninety-six separate times, Minor posted takedowns under the guise of Bungie’s “brand protection” provider, using a fake email address purporting to represent the rights holder. This put undue pressure on innocent content creators and caused “significant reputational and financial damage” to Bungie.
“The Destiny community is perplexed and upset that Bungie is breaking its promise to allow players to build their streaming communities and YouTube channels on Destiny 2 content,” the document reads. “Destiny community members have also been misled into believing that Bungie’s brand protection agent is also fraudulent, leading to confusion among users about the veracity of legitimate DMCA notices.
“Bungie had to dedicate a lot of internal resources to fix the problem and help its players get their videos and channels back – even though YouTube has a form that allows anyone to claim to represent a copyright owner and issue a copyright strike, this effort has become To make things even more complicated, it already has no dedicated mechanism for impersonated copyright holders to let YouTube know of DMCA fraud. This means that Bungie has to work through several layers of contact with YouTube over a period of days before they can fully communicate and start resolving the issue.
It continued in the filing that Bungie was entitled to an amount of damages to be proven at trial, as well as damages and injunctive relief. This includes an increase in statutory damages of $150,000 for each work in the fraudulent takedown notice involving willful infringement of a registered copyright, for a total of $7,650,000.
