Bungie brand rights contractor CSC Global sent Minor a formal DMCA copyright notice in December 2021 to remove the soundtrack from the Destiny: The Taken King expansion, the complaint states.
Unexpectedly, Minor created a Gmail account imitating CSC, and then forwarded similar notifications to other YouTube publishers – even Bungie officials were teased by him.
Minor (the YouTube network name Lord Nazo) claimed to be a CSC representative in the email, requesting the relevant account to remove the video, otherwise he may face a copyright warning from the platform.
However, Minor’s “false information” campaign under the guise of Bungie apparently triggered an online violence against the studio’s “excessive rights protection” by the melon eaters.
Then, during the review process, Bungie discovered that Minor had carried out a total of 96 similar activities, designed to provoke the anger of innocent YouTube creators for their Destiny 2 videos being taken off the shelves.
This way of doing things has undoubtedly caused considerable confusion and unease to the Destiny gaming community, leading to public accusations that Bungie has broken its promise to allow players to build their own streaming communities and YouTube channels on top of Destiny 2 content .
After attracting reports from the game media, the official had no choice but to come forward in March to clarify that he was not the mastermind behind the relevant incident, and made it clear under what circumstances would a DMCA copyright takedown notice be issued.
By aggregating the relevant complaints, Bungie traced it back to Minor through a different email address, only to find that his original motivation was simply to retaliate for the original takedown notice.
After figuring out what happened, Bungie is suing for financial damages due to reputational infringement. But in addition to Minor’s personal actions, the studio also suggested it exploited a loophole in YouTube’s reporting system.
The Minor made it easy to impersonate a CSC employee because YouTube requires all reports to come from a Gmail account, not a verifiable company domain name that allows content creators to verify authenticity.
Bungie complained that Google’s mechanism, which fully allows anyone claiming to be the rights owner to issue a takedown notice, did not consider introducing practical safeguards against fraud.
On the other hand, Minor’s demagoguery works because the copyright stick in recent years has been strong enough to generate a lot of controversy.
In particular, DMCA requests can crack down on YouTube and other Internet creators with almost no warning and consequences, and some copyists even use this mechanism to blackmail the original owner.