Fallout From Nintendo’s ‘Zelda’ Freak-Out Continues, Including Nintendo Self-Harm
There's that old saying: the coverup is always worse than the crime. There appears to be something of a corollary to that: the freak-out over a leak is always worse than the leak itself. Let's call that Geigner's Law, because why the hell not?
You should recall that Nintendo has been in full freak-out mode over the past few weeks as a result of its Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom title leaking early. Even before the leak, Nintendo went after a bunch of YouTubers via DMCA notices, all because those YouTubers were showing other Zelda titles incorporating mods into the gameplay. After the leak, Nintendo decided the best course of action was to sic its legal teams on all kinds of tools and content that had anything even tangentially to do with Switch emulation, even if those tools could be used for non-infringing purposes.
But none of that represents Geigner's Law, really. For that you need to witness the mayhem Nintendo has introduced by improperly DMCAing all kinds of content that ultimately redounds to sanctioned Nintendo content.
Ever since copies of Tears of the Kingdom leaked early and started spreading online due to piracy, Nintendo has been in a frenzy, removing social media channels and Discord servers promoting leaked footage and secrets from the game. At first slow to react, the company now appears to be hitting anything that remotely looks like a leak with a takedown notice.
lol my Twitch just got suspended mid-stream because I was reacting to @SkillUpYT's Zelda preview video," [Alanah] Pearce tweeted on May 8. She was in the middle of streaming footage from the YouTuber SkilUp's Nintendo-sanctioned preview of Tears of the Kingdom when her channel was taken offline due to a copyright strike by the company. Absolute banger of a week this week tbh," she wrote.
The original video was all aces as far as Nintendo was concerned, but a reaction video to that same content somehow was worthy of a DMCA takedown notice? Super cool stuff. Pearce is a former games journalist and writer for IGN, among other things, so exactly the right person to piss off with a DMCA notice issued in error.
But hey, copyright enforcement is hard and one-off errors happen, amirite? Surely this couldn't be something that Nintendo would screw up multiple times... oh wait:
Nintendo YouTuber Austin John Plays shared a tweet with a screenshot from one of IGN's previews that was also seemingly removed at the company's request. I received a DCMA takedown of my tweet from anti-piracy Nintendo of Japan for my tweet about IGN's video and the word [autobuild]," he wrote on May 8. They took mine down but haven't [done] anything about IGN's 1.2M video."
Okay, fine, it happened twice. But even that is understandable, right? Austin John Plays may have tweeted an IGN preview screenshot, but something about the tweet must have set off the DMCA alarm bots and caused them to issue a takedown notice. Who the hell knows who this YouTuber even is, right? Not the folks at Nintendo! They wouldn't issue takedowns haphazardly against entities Nintendo would know for sure are legit distributors of sanctioned Nintendo content, right? Right!?!?
Nintendo even accidentally hit itself with a takedown notice. Yesterday, a tweet by the official Zelda Twitter account in Japan temporarily had a media not displayed" error after a screenshot from the game was removed in response to a report from the copyright holder." How the hell do you copyright claim yourself," one commenter responded.
At this point, we may need to crowdsource some kind of wellness check on Nintendo. The company appears to be so completely spun out of control over the leak of a game a week or so before its official release that it's flailing about, causing all kinds of collateral damage, and even engaging in some unintentional self-harm.
Nintendo... buddies... just take a deep breath and relax, would you? The whole Geigner's Law thing could end right here. I don't actually want it to become a thing anyway, but you're not helping.