One City Builder Game’s Tale Shows Just How Wide Open The DMCA Process Is For Abuse

We've had no shortage of posts at Techdirt on the problems of fraud and abuse in the current DMCA takedown process. The reason for that is pretty obvious: the whole thing is so wide open to this kind of abuse that it's actually sort of a wonder that it doesn't suffer from it even more frequently than it already does. We've seen individuals use it try to silence online criticism. We've seen it used by media companies to try to silence speech they don't like.

And now we're seeing how an individual, perhaps one who is at least slightly unhinged, can create complete chaos for a video game publisher out of spite using the DMCA takedown process. The backstory here is that game studio 3Division made a game called Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It was released way back in early 2019. There is a vibrant community around this came and one member of that community created a helpful guide on how to make the game play more realistically. While 3Division was already working on a game mode to do the same thing, it reached out to the community member and offered to add his name the credits of the game to show their thanks. But only after the new game mode was released.

And that's when everything went to hell.

3Division say this player then, having been told they wouldn't added to the credits until after this new mode had been completed and released, started to abuse the YouTube report system issuing copyright strikes to one of our most helpful influencers", and that as a result of this behaviour they withdrew their offer to officially thank him.

In response to this, it's claimed the player then reported the game's website and had it taken down (the link now directs back to 3Division's main company page), then began reporting other official YouTube videos from the studio as well. Matters have now escalated to the point where the game itself has been taken off Steam due to a DMCA request, and the player is now claiming that they own the rights to the [realistic] game mode". For what it's worth, 3Division say they are are working to resolve the issue".

As of the time of this writing, the game still does not appear on Steam at all. Obviously writing a guide on making the game more realistic doesn't somehow give this person rights over the game mode. That's completely absurd. But he or she was still able to abuse the DMCA process so completely so as to get the game completely delisted from Steam and get all of this content on the web taken down. And that's even more absurd.

3Division released a statement, the English of which is so-so, so I'll paraphrase it instead. First, the publisher hints that this bad actor might be a lawyer. They promise to fight through all of this, regardless the cost, including suing the individual directly. And then, the part I will input a quote for, goes into why this is all the result of the DMCA process being far too open to this sort of thing.

Another aspect what is very sad is that, DMCA mechanics just not works, seems like anybody can claim anything, the service provider is just forced to remove the content and in general not ask or nor the considering if the claims are real. Signed lawyer seems enough and everybody get fear from long and costly suits, content is then removed.

This is Sad!

Sad, indeed, in large part because this sort of thing is nothing new and there have long been calls to fix this, all of which appear to have fallen on deaf ears.