Bungie, the developer behind Destiny 2, has filed a lawsuit against the parties behind a series of fraudulent DMCA strikes that took place throughout March, which affected content creators on YouTube and even Bungie’s own channel in the process. The complaint, which can be read here, was filed on March 25 in the Western District of Washington, and is aimed at up to ten alleged individuals.
All of this began early in March when Bungie issued takedowns targeted at Destiny YouTube channels dedicated to archive soundtracks, most of them which are no longer available in the game, nor in any music streaming platforms. A Reddit thread from March 16 details how users such as Breshi and Promethean were hit with said strikes. As such, they were led to delete all Destiny content from their channels to avoid any further issues. The next day, new DMCA strikes ensued, but these did not come from Bungie. The situation was raised and clarified by the developer in a statement on March 20, saying that “these actions are NOT being taken at the request of Bungie or our partners.”
We’re aware of a series of copyright takedowns on YouTube and we're actively investigating. This includes content on our own Bungie channels.
These actions are NOT being taken at the request of Bungie or our partners. Please standby for future updates.
https://t.co/xPY1EzkgTh— Bungie (@Bungie) March 20, 2022
Prominent content creators such as The Phoenix, AztecRoss, and My Name Is Byf were a target of the fraudulent strikes. Their channels aren’t exactly focused on music archives, and instead feature gameplay clips. During the following days, the issue escalated so much that it affected Bungie’s own channel. If you’re wondering how is it possible that YouTube didn’t stop any of this in time, well, that’s where it gets a bit chaotic.
To process DMCA claims, Bungie works with third party vendor CSC Global. Between March 17 and March 22, a series of strikes were filed by alleged perpetrators using fake email addresses (presented as first name, last name, and then followed by csc@gmail.com) that were then approved. Now, while it’s always strange to receive an “official” email from any company that doesn’t come from an address with their own domain (in this case @csc.com), it seems like this didn’t raise any red flags.
As such, the claims were successful, affecting all the aforementioned parties who had uploaded videos around Destiny while respecting their copyright requirements. According to the developer’s intellectual property guidelines, if the service enables players to monetize content, Bungie “will generally not request takedown if at least 20% of the content within the video has been created by the player.”
“The most recent wave of takedowns was peculiar and upon further investigation we have confirmed that they included some takedown actions from fraudulent accounts created to impersonate our IP protection service,” says the developer on a This Week At Bungie post on March 24, the day before the lawsuit was filed. In addition, Bungie asked the community to be patient as it works with YouTube to correct the fraudulent DMCA notices, and to “refrain from harassing any member of the community or any employee of CSC.”
“Google has confirmed that the accounts that have submitted fraudulent legal requests to YouTube have been terminated and will no longer have access to Google products. All fraudulent submissions from these accounts will be reversed (some have already, the rest should come through shortly). The processing of these takedowns was an enforcement mistake by Google, and beyond rescinding the strikes and reinstating the videos, they are also working on process improvements to reduce the likelihood of any similar mistakes in the future.”
As first reported by TorrentFreak, from March 19 to March 22 Bungie attempted to reach out to YouTube representatives for a response, and met several obstacles. The first email to the developer’s own representative led to an out-of-office reply, and it wasn’t until the next day when YouTube’s Director of Gaming Publishers and Commerce Content Partner got back to Bungie, asking if a helpdesk ticket had been filed already. It took until March 22 for the company to take action on the takedowns, but it’s clear that the developer wants to find who was responsible.
Bungie asked YouTube to disclose details about the people behind the fake CSC email addresses, but it seems the representatives weren’t cooperative. As stated in the lawsuit, Bungie claims that “Google would not share any information identifying who the fraudulent users were, including channel identifiers, email addresses, or other identifying information, without a law enforcement request or civil process”. On a rather adamant response, the developer mentions that “fortunately for the people whose videos were targeted by the Fraudulent Takedown Notices, Bungie has the financial resources to begin that civil process in order to meet Google’s requirements.”
But the Destiny 2 DMCA odyssey doesn’t end there. The lawsuit also includes information on one of the alleged users responsible for the false strikes, under the name of Damian Reynolds, which began sending emails to CSC saying “you’re in it for it now” and to “better start running” as the “clock is ticking”. The same account emailed David Thomson, the alleged person behind the davidthomsoncsc email address that appeared during the false takedowns, saying that “if I were you, I’d delete my Google account right now because Bungie (and probably even Google) are gonna come after you hard.”
The situation gets even more intense from here. The lawsuit continues with information on YouTube users Aussiehalo and Breshi, whom forwarded Bungie’s community team an email which was allegedly sent from the Jeremy Wilands account, also related to the false strikes, in which the account takes credits for the fraud in the form of a “Manifesto”. In an excerpt included in the lawsuit, the person claims to be “one of the people who filed false takedowns on videos uploaded by you and others in the Destiny community”. It then goes into detail by saying that David Thomson, the alleged person behind davidthomsoncsc, issued false takedowns to them several months ago.
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After a period of time hoping that Bungie would take notice and seeing the issues did not raise enough awareness for any possible solutions, the person behind the Jeremy Wilands account “had to escalate the matter” on their own terms — they claim that if they hadn’t taken matters personally, “many people would not have had their takedowns removed”. While the person claims that they fully intended to retract the takedowns and stop issuing them after Bungie had acknowledged the issue, there is a long message targeted at YouTube’s own vulnerabilities when it comes to anyone being able to claim DMCA strikes.
“YouTube’s copyright takedown system is incredibly flawed. Their verification system for takedown requests is so gullible that people, such as I and “David Thomson”, are able to file takedowns without any legitimacy to our names. If you’re looking to place blame, place it on YouTube for its sloppy copyright takedown system and Bungie for ignoring this issue for so long I could tell you how I got YouTube to think I was a legitimate representative for Bungie. All it took was a single sentence. No documents, no license, no private information.”
It remains uncertain how the situation is going to continue from here. Bungie is employing a subpoena to uncover the people behind the false strikes, and when it comes to users dedicated to uploading music tracks to their channels for archival purposes, the developer shared new guidelines to follow moving forward. In summary, the uploaded content can’t be an OST song that Bungie has already releases or posted elsewhere publicly, the content cannot be monetized, and the creator needs to obtain permission by contacting the licensing team beforehand.
