The lawsuit, filed on March 25 in a Washington state court and first reported by TorrentFreak, targets 10 unidentified John Does allegedly responsible for the DMCA strike wave against both Bungie and various Destiny 2 creators. Bungie accuses the account holders of abusing the studio’s trademarks, violations of consumer protection law, and at least four additional causes which all caused “nearly incalculable damage” to both the studio and the game’s community.
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While Bungie has filed a subpoena for additional information on the accounts, the studio said in its suit it believes the strikes were in retaliation for strikes Bungie had issued earlier in March. These strikes were said to be against channels posting Destiny soundtrack videos, and Bungie believed these account holders were the ones responsible as the strike wave began the day after the studio’s strikes went through. Bungie added to this, saying the Gmail accounts linked to the strike requests were similar to the ones used for the studio’s own strike requests.
Bungie also took aim at YouTube, saying the accused were able to issue these strikes “because of a hole in YouTube’s DMCA-process security” which can seemingly let “any person, anywhere in the world” issues strikes “on behalf of any rights holder, anywhere.”
When the wave of DMCA strikes began, the only channels hit were smaller music channels posting tracks from Destiny and Destiny 2’s various soundtracks. It wasn’t long after, though, that larger channels in the community started getting hit with takedown strikes alleging the content violated copyrighted music owned by Bungie. Some content creators, such as the aforementioned Aztecross, came dangerously close to losing their channels as a result of the content strikes.
However, it became clear shortly after these strikes were not issued by Bungie after the studio said strikes had been filed against its own YouTube content. Bungie notified the community, saying it would investigate the strikes and work to get the situation resolved as quickly as possible. It wasn’t long after this the strikes were taken down and channels started posting content again.
Destiny 2 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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Source: TorrentFreak
