Destiny Community Plagued By Copyright Takedowns, Bungie Insists It Isn’t Them
We've been making the point for years that the way copyright is currently enforced in online platforms is wide open for abuse and error. Between all the collateral damage created by automated copyright bots and all of the chicanery used to silence critics or to baselessly collect revenue on the work of others, there is simply more of this nonsense going on than most people realize.
The issue was first raised in this Reddit thread last week, when it was noticed that the work of a number of prominent Destiny music archivists" was being removed. This is a particular sore point for the community, since their channels were helping preserve the soundtracks to pieces of content-from both Destiny games-that were no longer available in the games themselves.
But sometimes this sort of thing happens involving a wildly popular good or service, allowing us to highlight for the larger public how big a problem this all is. In this case, we're talking about how the Destiny community is getting slammed with copyright takedowns on YouTube videos.
Things escalated from there over the next few days, with more and more soundtrack videos removed from the channels of more and more community members and creators. Then the takedowns even began extending to clips people had uploaded of cutscenes from the game that merely had pieces of the soundtrack playing in the background.
So, a bunch of fans of Destiny looking to preserve now-gone music from the games are finding their videos gone and their accounts facing copyright strikes. It won't surprise you to learn both that the community was quite pissed off by all of this and immediately started pointing at Bungie and CSC, a Bungie affiliate. But when the noise got loud enough, well, things got strange.
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
Yeah, that's Bungie saying not only is it not the one getting all this content taken down, but even its channels were getting hit. Now, as others have already pointed out, you may notice the careful wording of that tweet. That word request" is doing a lot of work, as it leaves open the door for this to be some automated system that Bungie chose to employ.
So, while we don't know yet if this is in the automated system collateral damage category, or the fraudulent copyright takedown category, we do know that there is a problem with how this is all working. And, yet, you can be assured that is unlikely anything substantive will be done about it.