In what is certainly a wild turn of events, a Destiny 2 YouTuber is now being sued by Bungie for millions of dollars after allegedly significantly manipulating the YouTube copyright system. YouTube’s copyright system has been heavily criticized over the years for a number of reasons, largely due to how easy it is for a company or person to take down a channel’s content or put a strike on a channel, sometimes without warrant. It has led to many public battles with top creators and major corporations, but the latest incident is something entirely different. Earlier this year, YouTubers and even Bungie itself had dozens of videos hit with copyright notices… from someone claiming to be Bungie. Of course, Bungie isn’t going to copyright strike its own videos, so this prompted an investigation from the game developer and now, there are some potential answers for this questionable behavior.
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Bungie has filed a lawsuit against a YouTuber known as Nick Minor AKA Lord Nazo for $7.6 million. The lawsuit alleges Minor went on a spree of issuing 96 copyright notices against other YouTubers to retaliate against Bungie after the developer took his channel down for reuploading music from theย Destiny: The Taken Kingย andย Destiny 2: The Witch Queenย soundtracks. Minor’s YouTube channel only has about 3,000 subscribers, so it’s hard to say how he’ll be able to come up with that hefty chunk of change if he has to pay up. Needless to say, it’s a pretty wild series of events and one that Bungie is actively working to resolve. You can view an excerpt of their statement from a recent blog post below.
“We take these matters seriously and will invest the time and resources required to protect our community from malicious actors,” said Bungie. “That said,ย do not attempt to harass, attack, or pile onto this individual. Any direct outreach not by Bungie’s legal team could impair our ability to address the harm done to our community, which is our priority. We have your backs on this and will make sure this individual meets with the future they deserve. Much though we appreciate the sentiment, we aren’t asking for your help in making that happen.”
Bungie is also working to process license requests for archived music uploads, something that will allow people to more easily use and access the developer’s music without getting hit by a copyright strike. As of right now, it remains to be seen how this will unfold, but it has resulted in a feeling of betrayal from Destiny community members who know Minor. You can read a bit more about that in a report from Kotaku.
