Two Decades Of Content In ‘Garry’s Mod’ Taken Down, Possibly By Nintendo Impersonator

The capricious nature of Nintendo’s IP enforcement practices are, if you’re a regular reader here, quite legendary. In this case, however, it seems like Nintendo’s reputation is what played a part in some copyright fuckery, rather than the company engaging in said fuckery itself.

If you’re not familiar with Garry’s Mod, then you obviously weren’t much of a gamer in the mid-2000s. Built off of Valve’s Source engine, the “game” is essentially a sandbox game with all of the physics of the engine, but in an open “world” in which players can more or less do whatever they want. It also allows for all kinds of user-created mods and content to be added. And, because Nintendo was and remains quite popular with a sizable segment of the gaming population, some of that user generated content created over the past roughly two decades included content and characters from Nintendo games.

The past tense in that sentence being important here, given that it was only recently that Kotaku reported that Nintendo demanded and got all of that content yanked down from the game entirely.

In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “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.”

The update continues, “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.”

So why would Nintendo do this now, after years and years of the content in question existing? It obviously cannot be that Nintendo is suffering some form of irreparable harm due to its own fans having fun creating Nintendo-y things within Garry’s Mod. Were that the case, surely all that harm would have come to Nintendo’s attention somewhere over the course of the last eighteen-plus years. But for all that time, Nintendo was silent.

And, it appears, Nintendo has remained silent. Truth be told, there existed a version of this post taking Nintendo to task for being a bunch of nonsensical copyright assbags. That post has since been rewritten into this one, however, after we noticed some interesting contributions from our awesome community on our Techdirt Insider Discord channel.

Brewster T. Koopa was one of the modders who had content removed from Garry’s Mod. They were adamant from the jump that it was unlikely Nintendo was actually behind the takedowns, based mostly on the above timeline. Then came the answer, with a screenshot from another person explaining just what happened.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. And, frankly, the story here is the same as it was in that previous case with Bungie. The reason these bad actors are able to pull this sort of crap is due to two things. First, and least important, is Nintendo and Bungie’s reputations for being absolutely draconian when it comes to copyright enforcement. That’s something fairly close to victim blaming in this instance, to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine someone being able to pull this off with a CD Projekt Red or a company with a reputation for being more lenient on copyright matters.

But the real culprit here is Valve’s DMCA review process. If some folks on the internet can figure out in fairly short order that these takedowns are coming from an email address and domain that are not actually owned by or associated with Nintendo, then someone on Valve’s end could have figured this out as well. Instead, the content just came down. And if we’re going to have a DMCA process that looks anything remotely like it does today, that’s a pretty damned big problem. Collateral damage when it comes to matters of speech are simply not acceptable.

So, Valve needs to do better. And, sure, it would be nice if Nintendo turned over a new leaf and was better on copyright matters generally, but the company in this case was also something of a victim here.