Gearbox now has a publishing business, it would, in my opinion, be great if Gearbox Publishing could take over future Borderlands content. Unfortunately Gearbox is almost certainly locked into contracts with 2K that would make it very difficult if not impossible to do.
And, yeah, stuff like this doesn’t make me feel good about 2K or game publishers in general - and more bad feelings between publishers and gamers isn’t something we need in the world. 2K has a right to protect their investments, but this could have been handled much better.
3 Likes
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#23
I have no proof of this, but I recall 2k having exclusive rights to the Borderlands IP, so if Gearbox goes their way, they would loose the right to develop for the Borderlands IP. To be honest, it would hurt, but Gearbox could rebuild a new IP for a life after Borderlands.
I’m skeptical that any Youtuber who’s been invited to any events at the behest of GBX or their publisher is going to say anything about this. I mean, sure, Take-Two are authoritarian d!cks, but to put the situation in its proper perspective: I read yesterday that BL3 has sold 22 million copies. If everyone who bought a copy only bought the base game and not a fancier edition or season pass, that’s $1.32 billion - with a B. And the game hasn’t even been released yet. So, I don’t think they care about a sales loss in the tens of millions (if it even would be that) because some gamers want to stand up for a youtuber or protest authoritarian d!ck moves or bullying of gamers by large corporations.
“Oh, you want to protest the game? That’s fine, because it just grossed more than the highest grossing film of all-time and it hasn’t even been released yet, but you go ahead and not play it, we really don’t care.” And judging by Take Two’s response, they really don’t.
Unless if 2K did what Activision did after Bungie ended their partnership and gave them the Destiny IP.
1 Like
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#26
I don’t even mean Borderlands YouTubers, but every bigger YouTuber. And its not so much about revenue, but about the reputation authoritarian moves draw to Take-Two. They can have their money, but if it becomes widely known that they try to ■■■■ on fair use and control everything, we might have something on our hands. It’s still absurdly unlikely though, I know that.
@Tracer I doubt it. I wouldn’t let go a franchise like Borderlands either if I had it. There lies way too much money in it. Although the argument can be made why Activision let Destiny go, so I don’t really know. Maybe Bungie had some contractual backdoors? Who knows?
1 Like
VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#27
I think this is a stretch. Speaking generally (and not from any direct knowledge of the current situation) most game publishers allow game-play videos. (There is one notable exception but that’s not relevant here.) There are sometimes issues around YT’s automated content ID match when elements of the game sound track are licensed works from major music labels, but that usually involves whatever entity the label hired to monitor for its content rather than the game developers/publishers.
Unauthorised distribution of original content is another matter entirely. Take 2’s claim here seems to be that at least one of the videos published by SupMatto fell into this category - note that in his video, SupMatto states there were originally 5 claims, but 4 were withdrawn.
In his video, SupMatto describes the email notification over the Discord revocation as sounding “like boilerplate”, and I would tend to agree with his assessment on that. I don’t know what rights and procedures Discord has in place to contest a shutdown - it’s probably buried deep in the terms and conditions somewhere.
One thing to remember here is that companies tend to side with content creators publishers on issues like this because, under US regulations, they are not held responsible for user-generated content so long as they can demonstrate that they act to remove contested content when notified. Whether this is always justified is a good question - there have been some cases where a platform refused to take down content because the complainant did not actually have grounds for complaint and there was good reason to believe they were acting in bad faith. Such things tend to be the exception though. The short of it is, we may never know exactly what the specific complaint was in this particular case.
That’s my fav part of the 2k/Take Two response. This youtuber got me excited for BL3 in a big way, and now he infringed. Dude made super positive vids on all things bl.
6 Likes
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#29
If you look at it rationally, then even if there was clear-cut copyright infringement by SupMatto, he nonetheless made them money for free. There is more behind the scenes, but nonetheless, from what we know, SupMatto was a net profit for the whole franchise.
It’s been proved that publishing companies hire people to vulture on YouTube videos to claim anything that could lead to a copyright strike, in an attempt to take all the video’s revenue. Most false copyright claims are manually claimed by hired agents.
Here’s a very interesting video on the subject that shows how shady and disgusting these publishing companies are :
I honestly feel the same. He just sounded like a legit fan of the franchise, very enthusiastic about it and sharing very valuable information about it. Why Take-Two would decide to bully this man out of anyone is just beyond me.
That reminds me when Overwatch was coming out, Blizzard hired a third-party company to take down stuff made using pre-release assets from the game and one of their community managers whitelisted them a few weeks later.
Actually, it’s not a stretch to say that any corporation/entity can file a copyright takedown on any youtuber for any reason…The onus is on the youtuber to contest it then. If they contest it, it goes back to the corporation/entity which can then go ahead with their claim or withdraw it…If they go ahead, the claims is upheld and that then goes back to the youtuber who must then take legal action at that point…Pewdiepie and a number of large youtubers have made videos on the difficulties of this process for ordinary youtubers
The boilerplate Discord notification he received contained a series of generic terms as to why it was removed (hacked, cheat codes, cracked games etc.), none of which applied to SupMatto. I don’t know Discord very well and so don’t know the procedure by which you contest claims on it.
@Tracer Bungie paid Activision a large amount of money (possibly even giving them equity in their company) to be released from the Destiny IP publishing contract they had. Activision was not happy with the IP anyway and felt it was underperforming and that Bungie wasn’t making content fast enough for the IP…I don’t think this is similar to GBX/Take 2, as the Borderlands franchise is a huge moneymaker and I’m not sure GBX could afford to buy back the publishing rights to it…You are right that it’s possible, but I don’t see it happening.
3 Likes
VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#34
Oh there’s worse examples than that.
Music theory educational videos being taken down because they infringed on a recording of the classical piece (so public domain) the person in the video was clearly playing live
NASA videos being taken down because a news service had embedded a 20sec clip from them into their news broadcast and then claimed infringement of the broadcast (Scripps - multiple times, too)
The system is very much broken. Those 3rd parties are supposed to do human review of whatever the automated scripts flag, and take into consideration whether fair use is in play or not. Needless to say, there are multiple examples (like the above) where it’s abundantly clear no-one actually did that. Too bad the DMCA doesn’t include serious consequences for false claims.
The worst thing about this is that for some reason these companies get to be judge, jury and executioner in the case of a dispute to a false claim, which means they can just disregard the law unless you want to get through their high-powered lawyers and truck loads of bribe money (good f*cking luck, lol). And they also make themselves extremely difficult to contact too, see the video I linked above.
Coming back to the subject, there is absolutely nothing to excuse 2K falsely striking SupMatto’s videos, potentially taking his channel down. Another extremely shady action to add to the already colossal list …
I’ve seen Tech Support scammers with more integrity than these degenerates, seriously.
6 Likes
narfkeks
(May this forum rest in peace - Davin Dittrich)
#36
I now have to go to bed. I’ll be checking in here again in roughly 8-12 hours, so fire away.
They shut his Discord down for content he made on Youtube, which he found on Twitch.
They weren’t making copyright claims because they wanted content removed from public view, they made copyright claims to shut him down because he made them mad. They’ve been investigating him for 10 months - the copyright claims were his punishment. I don’t know why 6 of the 7 claims on YT didn’t stick, but I’m pretty sure they made multiple claims to put him over the threshold so that his account would be permanently banned.
As an aside, I’m not a lawyer, of course, but I don’t think they even have a copyright claim here, at least regarding the twitch images. I don’t think you can make copyright claims on images that you’ve published on a social media platform. They may not have intended to publish those images, but they did. You surrender certain rights to creative content when you publish on social media platforms - that’s how social media platforms work.
If those FL4K stills had been published on Twitter, instead of Twitch, and I retweeted the image, I don’t think you can make a copyright claim against me. I don’t think it matters - the copyright claims were just a way to punish him. Take-Two says there’s more to the story than he’s telling, and my guess is that this is about the leaks that he got from an inside source and discussed on his YT channel last Fall.
Disappointing. I’ve been checking his vids out, and he’s definitely been one of my main sources of info. If you don’t want any spoiler stuff, don’t listen in. Kinda hitting hard with a hammer at the wrong people.
2 Likes
VaultHunter101
(So long, and thanks for all the fish)
#40
So apparently Take Two/2K have made a statement through IGN:
So, I guess we’ll only find out more if one of the parties involved provides additional detail and/or this goes to court…
I am one of the first thousand subscribers to matto (i am everywhere if you have borderlands gameplay i will subscribe and hit the follow button) and i can say that when he posted leaks from his “sources” his followers skyrocketed to 100k+ and became a rockstar. Whenever he go live donations are pouring.
Now when the leaks turned out true, i said to myself that will not last forever and those “sources” might got compensation in return, and companies, especially now that anti bribery management campaign of companies is strengthening, will do something about it.