Garry's Mod faces deluge of Nintendo-related DMCA takedown notices | Hacker News Reader

Garry's Mod faces deluge of Nintendo-related DMCA takedown notices

engadget.com

50 pointsintunderflow27 comments

Serious question: why aren't false DMCA claims prosecutable as fraud? The elements are there - a knowingly false representation, detrimental reliance, and materiality.

Because the DMCA is for them not us.

I think it's only Nintendo that'd be able to go after someone sending claims in their name.

It'd likely be hard to find whoever sent a false notice on general, since there's no identity or address verification needed to send one.

Garry has now clarified that the takedowns were in fact issued by Nintendo, contrary to earlier reports.

https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/1783501547361411494

Hilariously, there are people there yelling it can’t be true.

To which:

A. Why would he have lied?

B. This has had millions of views across all platforms. If it wasn’t real, don’t you think Nintendo would be calling up and telling him that it was fake?

Thought I don't think its rational to think its fake I do want to add:

A: Its Garry. He used to go onto community servers and grief cause hes a troll and might find it funny to fan the flames.

B: If people think they are doing it anyways they might as well actually start pressing claims.

It should be required, by law, to accompany a DMCA claim with some kind of digital signature that can certify the issuer really owns the content (such as a company or law office certificate). Other than that, they're prosecutable as perjury, but in practice, no one ever inquires those cases.

The barrier of proof for a bogus DMCA is incredibly high. Even something like "our system sends out 100k takedowns a day, so it had to be automaded and sometimes we face false positives" is enough to shut down a case.

DMCA has many problems and needs to be updated for 20 years now. Remember the DECSS issues faced?

> we face false positives

> enough to shut down a case

... It boggles my mind that this could ever be considered an acceptable defense in any court.

Because copyright monopolists have trillions of dollars which they use to pay lobbyists and essentially buy laws such as the DMCA which says that you can issue a take down and it's up to poor sap on the receiving end to either submit or fight a costly legal battle to prove not just their innocence but their bad faith.

Nintendo seems to go through these litigious cycles every once in a while. I wonder if this is them asserting their IP as part of a larger strategy to focus attention on an upcoming system launch?

I think this misses the point of the article, which is that a third party is filing fake DMCA notices in Nintendo’s name.

The end of the article has an update of a post from Garry saying that the takedown notices are legitimate.

They have only recently started allowing their IP to be used for non-game products, like the recent Mario movies. My guess is that they are being litigious again because they want to avoid any confusion between sponsored and non-sponsored products.

As usual, it’s also worth remembering that compared to their competition:

- Nintendo is the most reliant on their own IP for sales

- Nintendo does not have a corporate giant to absorb any misfires

- Nintendo is the smallest gaming giant, at half the value of Sony, and less than a tenth the value of Microsoft

- Nintendo has the greatest dependency on maintaining an image of being family-friendly. Shock content wouldn’t muster a single headline for a Microsoft IP, but could be national news if it involves Yoshi and causes suicidal thoughts in a 6 year old

All of this adds up to a more strict attitude.

Only recently? They've had non-game products for decades. They had branded breakfast cereal back in the late '80s, the Mario, Zelda, and Captain N cartoons, the first Super Mario Bros. movie was released in 1993, etc.

I should have said, "re-allowed." But yes, and after that first movie, Nintendo really didn't want to let anyone else near their IP for a long, long time.

The Acquired episodes on Nintendo are great btw, and cover this extensively:

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars

From Wikipedia:

Released on May 28, 1993, Super Mario Bros. was a critical and financial failure, grossing $38.9 million worldwide against a budget of $42–48 million. Though appearing on several lists of the worst films ever made, it has developed a following over the years,[9][10] and has been reappraised by some as a cult classic for being "so bad it's good".[11][12][13] In 2013, a webcomic sequel was produced in collaboration with Bennett. After Super Mario Bros., Nintendo would not license another film based on the Super Mario game series for 30 years, until an animated reboot titled The Super Mario Bros. Movie was released on April 5, 2023.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._(film)

Apparently one individual was first to react and discuss these at length over twitter, and they convinced themselves that these takedown notices were not genuine:

>They previously argued that the takedown notices couldn't be from the Japanese gaming giant, because Nintendo add-ons have been around since 2005 and because the company would've contacted Valve, the publisher of Garry's Mod, itself.

The nonsensical logical leap of an internet detective. Instead of positive evidence, they make an inference from the absence of information, attaching great meaning to that inference. And then, with that rickety scaffolding, proceed to assert the claims were not legitimate.

There are probably innumerably many reasons, relating to idiosyncracies of where and how Nintendo allocates their resources, the discoverability and motivation to prioritize, that can account for timing.

I think if there's such a thing as Internet Detective Syndrome, it's core defining feature would be the inability to comprehend the extent to which facts are really just idiosyncratic nothingburgers, because reality itself really is that disorganized and without meaning sometimes. Sometimes the facts are just circumstantial, and not key clues that demand special explanation or attribution of special motivations.

That seems rather slow reaction time... Clearly they have not had many people actually looking around the Internet to find too many of these things always...

Nintendo having a weirdly slow reaction time is nothing new. For a long time it was possible to pirate 3DS games by downloading them directly from Nintendos CDN, because the authentication tickets needed to download from it weren't tied to any specific account or console and could be shared freely, and they allowed that to keep happening for years before reworking the backend to add a check that you actually own the game you're trying to download. They ignored that for so long that the 3DS was almost EOL by the time they fixed it.

It's a bit funny considering the latest zelda game took so much gameplay design from Garry's mod to begin with

This is a technically true story, but why don’t they report the Garry Mod has issued false DCMA notices too? It really seems like Engadget hates Nintendo.

What kind of IP has "a physics-based sandbox game" (quote Wikipedia) that warrants DCMA notices?

I mean to send out their own DCMA notices. Not receiving them.

Especially "a physics-based sandbox game" that doesn't really have assets of its own and just uses Half-Life 2 assets

One that has an internal system for uploading and downloading models and assets owned by other companies

I mean to send out their own DCMA notices. Not receiving them.

At least that's how I understood OP.

When did "the Garry Mod" do this?

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