YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email

A brave YouTuber has managed to defeat a fake Nintendo lawyer improperly targeting his channel with copyright takedowns that could have seen his entire channel removed if YouTube issued one more strike.

Sharing his story with The Verge, Dominik "Domtendo" Neumayer—a German YouTuber who has broadcasted play-throughs of popular games for 17 years—said that it all started when YouTube removed some videos from his channel that were centered on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Those removals came after a pair of complaints were filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and generated two strikes. Everyone on YouTube knows that three strikes mean you're out and off the platform permanently.

Suddenly at risk of losing the entire channel he had built on YouTube, Neumayer was stunned, The Verge noted, partly because most game companies consider "Let's Play" videos like his to be free marketing, not a threat to their business. And while Nintendo has been known to target YouTubers with DMCA takedowns, it generally historically took no issues with accounts like his.

For many YouTubers, a DMCA takedown request is considered too risky to challenge, even if it's obviously fake. The risk of losing their channels outweighs the risk of losing income from removing specific videos at issue, so users often choose to delete content voluntarily, rather than defend their content. Copyright trolls try to benefit from this, getting content removed that otherwise would remain on the platform and sometimes attempting to push users to submit unnecessary payments.

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