DidYouKnowGaming Gets Video Nintendo DMCA’d Restored
Back in December we discussed how Nintendo got a video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel taken down via a DMCA notice. While Nintendo is notorious for being an intellectual property bully and enforcing what it thinks are its rights in as draconian a manner as possible, what stood out about this particular story is that the video in question was a journalistic effort to document a game pitched to Nintendo that never came out, included no gameplay footage, and therefore didn't reproduce any actual game assets. It appears for all the world that Nintendo used the DMCA system to take down a video comprised of pure gaming journalism, which is not how any of this is supposed to work.
DYKG, for its part, both promised to fight the takedown and implored its Twitter followers to reach out to Nintendo and tell the company what they thought of this sort of censorship of facts.
Let @NintendoAmerica know what you think. pic.twitter.com/o9FM8ytey0
- DidYouKnowGaming (@didyouknowgamin) December 8, 2022
And now it appears that the channel made good on its promise to fight back, or at least not give in. YouTube restored the video this week after DYKG filed a counternotice, finding that there was no copyright infringement within the video.
We won," YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming tweeted on December 28. The Heroes of Hyrule video is back up." It added that YouTube confirmed the original copyright takedown notice was indeed from Nintendo and not an imposter, and that the video has received over 20,000 views in its first day back.
When you counter a DMCA on YouTube, the company who DMCA'd you has 10 working days to show that they've taken legal action against you, or the video is restored," tweeted Shane Gill, the owner of DidYouKnowGaming. So I spent the past two weeks checking my email to see if Nintendo was suing [sic] me."
I suppose that lawsuit could still be forthcoming, but man would it be a stupid move on Nintendo's part if that happened. Again, the important bit is that there is no actual Nintendo content being copied here or anything in the video that would fall outside of obvious fair use provisions.
The takeaway here is that it would be really nice if stories like this becamse more common, particularly when it concerns the more notorious IP bullies out there.