Nintendo Once Again Seeking To Unmask Discord User For Leaking Content
Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggravating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondent to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly suffered its share of leaked content and its response generally ranges from attempting to DMCA the leaks into oblivion - which never actually works - to unmasking and then bringing down the heaviest legal hammer it can wield upon the leaker. Lost in the sauce in all of this appears to be just how much this keeps those leaks Nintendo wanted to bury in the news, working at a complete cross-purpose to what the company's stated aims are.
It gets all the more silly when there are months and months in between the initial leak and this sort of legal action. Game Freak announced back in October of last year that it had suffered a breach and that content ranging from internal employee information to unreleased information about past and future Pokemon games had been exfiltrated. Shortly after the announcement, some of the leaked information began appearing on social media sites, including on Discord. There a user going by GameFreakOUT posted a bunch of the leaked content to a Discord Server called FreakLeak.
Again, that was all in October of last year. In April of this year, six months later, Nintendo has petitioned the court to unmask GameFreakOUT.
Nintendo is asking a California court to force Discord to give up the identity of the person behind last year's massive Pokemon data breach, known among the Pokemon community as the Teraleak." It's called theTeraleak because of just how much information was released online; the leaker claimed to have source code for the upcoming gamePokemonLegends: Z-A(though they did not release it), as well as next-generation Pokemon titles, builds of older games, and loads of concept art and lore documents.
The purpose of the subpoena is to obtain the identity of the Discord user GameFreakOUT,' who posted infringing content," wrote James D. Berkley, an attorney for Nintendo. Alongside the declaration, Nintendo included a partially redacted screenshot of the Discord server, in which the user GameFreakOUT posted a file and told users to enjoy."
Can Nintendo do this? Maybe. We've made this point before, but the unmasking of anonymous speakers on the internet ought to carry with it a very high bar over which petitioners should have to jump. Unmasking anonymous speech should be done to prevent future or current injury, not merely to punish accused bad actors. That said, that determination will be up to the court to decide.
But the broader point is why Nintendo is doing this now six months after the leak. All this serves to do for the time being is to keep the leak, and the information in the leak, in the news six months after the leak occurred. Nintendo may want to go the punitive litigation route as a deterrence, I suppose, but exactly how productive would that be? Is it really going to stop the next leak from happening? And if the answer to that is no", then what the hell is the point?
The answer is probably not that deep. Nintendo is a company with a litigious culture on matters of intellectual property. It may simply be that the questions above were never even asked of itself.