Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted

Bungie is Suing Destiny YouTuber for $7.7 Million for Issuing Fake DMCA Notices

Bungie is suing Destiny YouTuber Nick Minor, aka Lord Nazo, for $7.7 million in damages who allegedly issued fake DMCA strikes against fellow Destiny YouTube content creators while impersonating developer Bungie. The lawsuit came as a result of an investigation performed by Bungie when they were notified that content creators were being issued copyright notices on their channels, supposedly by Bungie themselves.

Earlier this year, Bungie had filed a lawsuit against a then-unnamed John Doe who had allegedly used a “loophole in YouTube’s DMCA-process security” to issue copyright strikes against multiple Destiny-centric YouTube channels.

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Now, it has been confirmed that the defendant in the claim is Nick Minor, a Destiny YouTuber known as Lord Nazo, who allegedly issued fake copyright claims against his fellow Destiny content creators. Minor was issued a copyright strike against his channel for publishing music from the original soundtrack for Destiny’s The Taken King, which was a legitimate claim by Bungie.

However, Minor refused to remove the video, after which it was forcefully taken down by YouTube. Soon after, fellow Destiny content creators started to receive DMCA notices as well, supposedly from Bungie, who then denied issuing any of these copyright claims. In its suit, Bungie claims that Minor acted in retaliation to their legitimate copyright strike by creating a fake Gmail account and impersonating Bungie staff, to send out fraudulent DMCA takedowns to channels in the Destiny community, such as My Name is Byf, Aztecross and Promethean.

“This case arises out of Nick Minor’s malicious campaign to serve fraudulent takedown notices to some of the most prominent and passionate members of that fanbase, purportedly on Bungie’s behalf, in apparent retaliation for Bungie enforcing its copyrights against material Minor uploaded to his own YouTube channel

Using the confusion engendered by his own false DMCA notices, Minor also sent a counternotification to YouTube, specifically challenging Bungie’s identification of his videos as infringing based on the idea that the notifications may have been part of his own wave of fraudulent takedowns.

The Destiny maker claims it is “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”

Bungie also recently settled a lawsuit regarding cheats created for Destiny 2, totalling $13.5 million. The guilty parties – Veterancheats, LaviCheats and Elite Boss Tech – were each fined $2 000 per download, and there were 6,765 unique downloads tracked for these cheats. PlayStation is still set to acquire the Destiny developer for $3.6 billion.

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Source: TheGamePost

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