Image: Bungie
A series of DMCA withdrawal notices for Destiny 2 content on YouTube earlier this year has turned into a $ 7.6 million lawsuit as Bungie goes after the alleged perpetrator in court. Also, some Destiny 2 content creators now say they feel “betrayed” after the seemingly responsible person denied it during Discord’s private chats with them. “I feel lied to, betrayed, and incredibly upset because someone we knew and trusted would do it,” Destiny Owen Spence wrote the music remix on Twitter. “Literally, almost all of Destiny’s music on YouTube is gone because of this.”
It’s a lot to unpack and it starts when a bunch of YouTube videos, including some of Bungie’s own, received notices of DMCA withdrawal in March of this year. Bungie announced the notices were fraudulent and weeks later took the matter to court to try to get Google to reveal the identity of the person responsible. As Bungie pointed out at the time, part of the reason why fraudulent withdrawal notices could increase in the first place was because YouTube’s copyright system is opaque and difficult to navigate (Bungie went through the service customer service and did not resolve the issue for days). Months later, the study now says that a Destiny 2 player named Nick Minor, who goes by Lord Nazo on YouTube, is allegedly responsible according to personal data obtained from Google on June 10th.
Minor and Bungie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This case stems from Nick Minor’s malicious campaign to send fraudulent withdrawal notices to some of the most prominent and passionate members of this fan base, allegedly on Bungie’s behalf, in apparent retaliation because Bungie enforced his rights to ‘author against the material Minor posted on his own YouTube channel,’ ‘the company wrote in a new lawsuit filed June 22 in the Western District Court of the United States in Washington.
Bungie alleges that Minor extracted 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 notice of withdrawal, Minor left the music on, and YouTube eventually turned off Minor’s channel. According to Bungie, that’s when Minor began impersonating a third-party agency it uses to enforce its copyright protections called CSC Global using fake Gmail addresses that resembled the company’s own.
Apparently in retaliation for the withdrawals against his own channel, Minor is supposed to have issued fraudulent withdrawals against 96 more videos, including some of his apparent mutuals in the rest of the Destiny YouTube music scene. Bungie also accuses Minor of using the smokescreen of suspicion that sparked his dismantling anger to sow distrust in the Destiny community and claim legitimate withdrawal notices against his channel.
“He is extremely disappointed to discover that Lord Nazo, our friend and someone in direct communication with us about the eliminations, was the person who issued the fake DMCA eliminations” on behalf of “Bungie,” Owen Spence, who orchestrates remixes of music from Destiny 2., he wrote on Twitter yesterday. “[Minor] He lied to us, started a DM from the Discord group with me, Promethean, Breshi and Lorcan0c, and then said things like that, acting like I was a victim. “
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Discord’s alleged chat logs show that Minor explains in March how easy it is to send fraudulent withdrawal notices and suggests that the culprit is someone abusing the YouTube system. Meanwhile, a screenshot of old tweets seems to show that Minor was writing to the Destiny 2 community manager at the same time that his channel was mistakenly caught in the removal season, even though it was supposedly what it was behind. During this time he also posted manifestos criticizing YouTube’s copyright withdrawal policies.
As Bungie puts it in his case, Destiny 2 is a live service game that thrives in part as a result of the community of players from other social platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. One area of community content is music, which includes looping tracks, remixes, re-orchestrations, and fan covers. Spence contrasts what Minor was doing (uploading live snippets of official soundtracks and then looping them with small audio edits) with attempts at preservation based on in-game recordings, as well as more transformative works (though it is unclear whether Bungie agrees with this distinction). As a result of Minor’s apparent actions, however, many of the latter group have also been removed from YouTube.
As an example, the Promethean YouTube channel, Archival Mind uploaded music while playing the game. While some of them still exist, such as the fight against the head of the First Disciple raid, many others were suppressed during the elimination season to avoid losing the entire channel. While there are offline backups, Promethean wrote in a March update on YouTube that they would receive prior approval from Bungie directly before moving on with future projects. Yesterday on Twitter they simply wrote, “Well … there’s a twist I didn’t see coming …”
“[Minor’s] The decision was ultimately a terrible attempt to draw attention to a problem that resulted in destroying what mattered to him, “Promethan told Kotaku in a direct Twitter message. They also said there is still an “ongoing dialogue” with Bungie about what types of Destiny music can be uploaded to YouTube from now on.
Bungie is also not taking the alleged crimes lightly. The study is looking for “precautionary damages and relief” for what it says is economic and reputational damage resulting from the incident. These damages include “$ 150,000 for each of the works involved in the fraudulent recall notice,” for a total penalty of $ 7,650,000 plus legal fees. Last week, Bungie won a double deal in a dispute with a Destiny 2 cheat seller. Minor’s YouTube channel, on the other hand, has less than 3,000 subscribers.