A DMCA takedown from Nintendo led to a prominent content creator having her Twitch account temporarily banned for streaming publicly available Zelda footage.
Sony Santa Monicawriter and content creatorAlanah Pearce tweetedthat her Twitch account was suspended mid-stream because she was reacting to a Tears of the Kingdom preview video bySkillUp.
While some players have been sharing footage of Tears of the Kingdom from a leaked version of the game, SkillUp’s footage was part of aNintendo-approved preview event in Australia where they were allowed to capture footage.
As such, Pearce was effectively suspended from Twitch for streaming Tears of the Kingdom footage that had already been pre-approved by Nintendo.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom guides:
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“Lol, my Twitch just got suspended mid-stream because I was reacting to SkillUp’s Zelda preview video,” Pearce tweeted. “It would appear that Nintendo DMCA’d me for watching approved Zelda gameplay.”
In a comment under a separateYouTube videoexplaining the situation, Pearce added that Twitch informed her it had been Nintendo that issued the DMCA, rather than SkillUp or another third party.
Pearce was able to contest the takedown with Twitch as a false DMCA, and later had her account unbanned.
The incident is one of many instances of DMCA takedowns being issued by Nintendo, as the release date for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom nears.
The game was leaked onlineat the start of May, and Nintendo has been trying to firefight the situation ever since, not only taking down footage of the game but also trying to prevent players from accessing tools that may allow them to play pirated versions.
As reported byKotaku, the company issued multiple DMCA takedown requests to software hosting service GitHub, to remove a homebrew tool designed to make it possible to play Switch games on an emulator.
Further reading
Lockpick is a tool which lets players dump the unique encryption key from their own Switch so it can be used to play backups of Switch games onPCemulators.
While some players claim this is legal for creating their own backups – something Nintendo nevertheless disputes in its takedown claims – one of the steps in playing piratedNintendo Switchgames involves downloading someone else’s encryption key, a number of which are available for download online.
They also sent dmca to people who were hosting prod.keys in github. Here’s mine must have accidentally forked it long time ago.pic.twitter.com/bPWJDRQoJy
GitHub currently lists aDMCA takedown requestfrom Nintendo in which 81 separate instances of repositories storing copies of Lockpick have been taken down. It also lists numerous other DMCA takedown requests to have encryption keys removed from the site.
The team working on SwitchAndroidemulator Skyline has also announced that it received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo, due to its use of Lockpick.
As stated in a now-removed Discord post (reported byNintendo Life), the Skyline team has now ceased all development on its emulator “due to the potential legal risks involved”.
