There’s a strange thing going on related to Nintendo, that turns out may have nothing to do with Nintendo at all.
A few days ago, the Garry’s Mod Steam page shared this update:
“Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.
Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.
This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through. If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”
While Nintendo is known for taking legal action regarding their IP, this action didn’t completely make sense. If Nintendo didn’t like seeing their characters in Garry’s Mod, why did they wait 20 years to request a takedown?
Those of you who were asking question, it turns out, could be on the money. Several people in the Garry’s Mod community have pointed out that their content have been targeted by trolls filing fake DMCA claims of their content.
We’ll quote Garry’s Mod user Brewster T. Koopa, who helped bring the issue to light. On Twitter, all the way back in February, they shared this:
“[PSA] False flaggers on the Garry’s Mod Workshop.
There is someone, or a group of trolls going around the Gmod workshop filing false DMCA claims and shutting down addons, over 10 Gmod addon makers, myself included have been attacked, with over a dozen of our addons gone.
We ruled out Nintendo being the culprit because of the following reasons:
1: Gmod Nintendo addons have been around as early as late 2005-early 2006
2: if Nintendo wanted them taken down they’d file a complaint with Valve like Warner did with Harry Potter.”
Brewster T. Koopa later shared details from other modders, who believe they have traced the person putting up fake DMCAs, and shared evidence of the fake or incorrect claims. There have also been others posts about this on Steam and Reddit, but they all share the same story.
The person has been attacking modders on Garry’s Mod, particulary those who make Nintendo content, but they don’t actually work for Nintendo. While the evidence these modders share could be argued to be circumstantial, it’s also worth pointing out that Nintendo has not made any press releases corroborating they made these requests to Garry’s Mod developer Facepunch Studios. Thus far, they also haven’t made any statement to the press about this issue.
There’s just enough ambiguity around it that Garry Newman himself tweeted this out a few hours ago:
“Yes, we have got your emails and dms, we have seen your theads, we’re doing our own investigations. We need to take these things seriously (particularly from Nintendo), but we also can’t let people misuse DMCA takedowns.”
