Breakdown
- Greg Newman made a post on how Garry's Mod had received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo to remove all its copyrighted content.
- Many users suggested that the copyright was fake based on interactions with Nintendo's customer support staff.
- It has since been confirmed that the DMCA is legitimate and was officially sent by Nintendo.
After Nintendo's recent DMCA against Garry's Mod, there was lots of discussion and rumours about the request being fake. However, there is no more room for doubt as Gary Newman himself has confirmed that the DMCA from Nintendo is official and legitimate.
In a recent post on X(formerly known as Twitter), Gary Newman confirmed, "I have been assured that the takedowns have been verified by Nintendo as legit, so this will now continue as planned. Sorry. 🫸🍄🗑️"
This puts the nail in the coffin for hopefuls who were relying on some messages from Nintendo customer service reps as evidence. The rep was obviously not in the know about the legal team's situation and people used this as evidence to claim that the DMCA was fake.
After the initial announcement, many started questioning the legitimacy of the DMCA and made sure this was known by the team. In response, the developer tweeted, "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."
However, a few hours after this he released the confirmation statement mentioned above.
Despite all the outcry from fans of Garry's Mod and people who are staunchly against such strict copyright, Gary was pretty clear on his stance on the matter, stating "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."
Nintendo is known for some of the most severe lawsuits you can face for infringing on its copyright material. Seriously, you don't want to cross Nintedo, it could ruin your life. It's basically the Ferrari of the gaming world, known for its hardline stance towards even the smallest breach of contract.
Almost 20 years' worth of Nintendo-related content is being removed from the Steam Workshop, and this is no small task. In fact, Gary himself has asked for players to help and said "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."
So, if you want to help out, you might as well go delete any Nintendo-related content you might have uploaded to the Steam Workshop. It's a major loss of both content and precious digital history, but it is what it is and we can't do anything about it.