There are many ways to show one’s love of video games. You can do special art of it, or you can do cosplays of your favorite characters, or if you’re feeling really creative, you can attempt to make your own video game that was inspired by another title! However you do it, it’s meant to be fun and honor the games you love the most. For one YouTuber, he decided to use mods of Mortal Kombat 1 and make special videos of funny matchups. You know, like putting Donald Duck vs. Goofy together and seeing them beat the crap out of each other. That’s funny. That is unless you’re Warner Bros.
Just before the weekend hit, a YouTuber named Toasted Shoes revealed that despite his channel being up for many months and getting over a billion views in the process, Warner Bros has decided to send a cease and desist order to the channel to force the YouTuber to stop making videos:
“This morning I received an IP Infringement Notification directly from Warner Brothers stating that the Mortal Kombat mods in my content ‘infringe’ on their intellectual property rights. I’ve been requested to delete all Mortal Kombat 1 videos from my channel or else they will issue copyright strikes and essentially delete my channel in its entirety.”
What makes this particularly infuriating to the YouTuber is that, as we stated before, he’s been doing this for some time. This isn’t a channel he made earlier in the month, and he started posting videos right after. Instead, he’s been posting videos, became really popular, and even noted that Ed Boon of NetherRealm Studios was sharing his mod videos! Thus, he didn’t have a problem with it either.
So what’s going on here that led to Warner Bros doing this? The simple answer might just be that they didn’t know the channel was up until recently and decided to strike it down. Timing does play a factor in things like this.
Another thing is that they might not have realized what this channel was really doing, and once they figured it out, felt it “wasn’t right” for this YouTuber to get all this attention, and potentially all the money that the videos were making. It’s honestly hard to say.
What isn’t hard to say is that this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen something like this from Warner Bros Discovery. They’ve been making multiple terrible decisions recently, and we can add this to the list.
