You keep posting all kinds of cool gaming videos on YouTube, only to receive an email from Nintendo stating that your entire channel will be deleted. Pretty difficult if you earn your living from it. Fortunately, an observant YouTuber discovered that the threatening email did not come from Nintendo itself, but from a fake lawyer.
The DMCA is in force in the United States: Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This states, among other things, that you can ask someone who posts an image online in which you have the copyright to take it offline. If the person does not do this, you can go to the medium used to have it taken offline. This may also apply to YouTube channels of people from the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany, for example.
DMCA
The so-called lawyer threatened to ‘DMCA’ German YouTuber Dominik Neumayer, he tells TheVerge. The YouTuber known as Domtendo noticed that the video platform was taking some of his videos offline. Although he has been making play-throughs of entire games for 17 years, suddenly something was not quite right with the videos of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. They were allegedly removed because of the DMCA. If this happens three times, your entire channel can be closed.
Technically, YouTubers who show how they play games are of course using images that come from Nintendo, namely everything in the games, but this type of content is often seen as free advertising for the games, instead of game companies dealing with having them taken offline of this type of content. Nintendo has certainly provided YouTubers with such a DMCA, but not the type of accounts like Dominik’s.
Fake Nintendo lawyer
But, why would a fake lawyer want someone to delete his YouTube videos? Often when people also make videos about that subject, they want viewers to go to their channel so that they can make money with it. According to YouTube, 6 percent of videos removed from July to December 2023 were due to this type of practice. However, many channels do not indicate it, because they are far too afraid of problems. Still, they would do well to read the DMCA carefully. Domtendo saw something striking, which made him know that he was dealing with a fake. The DMCA was signed by Tatsumi Masaaki of Nintendo’s legal department and he would send his email from the email address tatsumi-masaaki@protonmail.com.
Reason for Dominik to ask extra questions and YouTube soon reposted his videos. However, this only made this fake Tatsumi fight even harder, something for which Dominik eventually even contacted Nintendo directly, who told him that the email address used was not an official Nintendo email address. Nintendo decided to investigate the matter further. Dominik noticed this quite quickly, because the fake lawyer suddenly informed him that he was withdrawing all his previous claims. However, another email was sent that looked very genuine, in which ‘Tatsumi’ stated that although he was no longer allowed to make claims, other Nintendo advisors would.
Nepmail
That fake email was Dominik’s salvation, because it allowed him to prove that it was fake: it even used a fairly standard web tool. The YouTuber still wants to continue the fight, but with a different opponent: YouTube. He would like to see YouTube change its policy and make it easier for YouTubers to ‘appeal’ these types of fake DMCAs. In any case, it is striking that Dominik had to figure it out himself: normally when someone protests after a DMCA has been honored, the medium asks the applicant to provide evidence. In many cases, these types of fake DMCA applications are also punishable.
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Source: www.bright.nl
