“Nintendo” DMCAs Sankaku Complex for Doujin Lewds

Sankaku Complex has received a DMCA takedown request purporting to be from Nintendo which demands the removal of a massive amount of user contributed Splatoon related adult artwork.

The request in its unredacted entirety as sent to Sankaku Complex’s officially registered DMCA notification agent, which also handily includes links to some quality Marina lewdness:

Dear Sankaku Complex,

This notice is addressed to you as the agent designated by Sankaku Complex to receive notifications of claimed infringement, as reflected in the current records of the U.S. Copyright Office. Under penalty of perjury, we hereby affirm that the undersigned is authorized to act on behalf of Company.

We have a good faith belief that content located on the Internet site found at the following URL (“Infringing Material”) infringes the rights of the Company:

https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7807068
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/13392209
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7604041
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/13892999
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7948402
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7848189
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7613852
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/15026246
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/14578787
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/14135373
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/12024808
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/10481358
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7769424
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7591124
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7561487
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/14767111
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/14250354
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https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/12731904
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https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/8041216
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https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/14578749
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https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7695783
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7561489
https://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/7584198

The Company represents that it has not authorized your customer to use the Infringing Material. Based upon information at the Company’s disposal, we believe that the statements in this notice are accurate and correctly describe the infringing nature and status of the Infringing Material.

Accordingly, we hereby request that Sankaku Complex immediately remove or disable access to the Infringing Material at the URL identified above. As you may know, if this information is not removed after notice that complies with the DMCA, the Internet Service Provider may also be held liable for the copyright infringement.

Should you have questions, please reply to this email.

Regards,

Nintendo of America Inc.
4600 150th Ave. NE
Redmond, WA 98052
425.882.2040
notice@mm-nintendo.com

Examining the request suggests it is little more than a moderately well-crafted forgery, sufficient only to gull lesser sites, or the drudges employed by tech giants to process such requests:

• The email address used, “notice@mm-nintendo.com”, is a completely different domain to Nintendo’s actual domain, “nintendo.com”
• “mm-nintendo.com” simply redirects to “nintendo.com”, in the attempt to make it seem related to Nintendo’s legitimate domain, but such a redirect can be trivially configured by any third party site
• The WHOIS and other DNS information for the two domains are also completely different, the fraudulent domain having only been active since 2013, being held by a completely different registrar with different domain settings, etc.
• The fraudulent domain’s DNS information includes only two records of note – an entry redirecting email to Google’s email servers, indicating the perpetrator likely used Gmail or Gsuite together with their fake domain, and a web server serving a redirect to “nintendo.com”
• The IP address of this web server – 72.52.10.14 – is simply a virtual instance in a cloud, a notorious technique of hackers and spammers, and has no relation to any official Nintendo networks
• There is no individual identified in the request as making the necessary declarations; a DMCA request must be made by an identifiable individual to be valid, and this would coincidentally make it very easy to confirm with Nintendo whether such a request was ever sent
• When queried directly, Nintendo confirmed that any such emails from them are expected to be from the “nintendo.com” domain
• Certain errors in both the format of the request and the language used suggest the writer is not a native speaker (or is a particularly badly educated one, even for an American) and not legally trained, neither of which would be likely from Nintendo of America proper

Further research easily surfaces instances where this email address has been used to take down fan games on several occasions and has even been spotted targeting Twitter avatars.

More broadly, DMCA claims against numerous fan projects by “Nintendo” have been ongoing for years, and whilst some are undoubtedly genuine there are enough apparently fraudulent claims occurring for there to be grounds to doubt just how many of these claims are actually legitimate.

It would appear a significant proportion of these claims may all be the work of one deranged individual, or else a party with a commercial interest in the matter, but actually investigating this matter is difficult when the majority of such claims appear not to be published and are instead merely acted on rapidly without too much scrutiny, due to the heart-stopping terror Nintendo’s name invokes in such matters.

Recently such DMCA claims by “Nintendo” (although with varying details, including requests supposedly from Nintendo of Japan) have also been causing particular havoc on Twitter: early in 2019, Japan’s top games bloggers Hachimaki and Jin both had their accounts locked due to such spurious claims, and in 2018 the official Kantai Collection account was suspended with a similar claim.

One poor soul lost his account to the claims and was then harried even on his new one, with Twitter’s amazing handling of the process letting the assailant make copyright claims against a blank header image.

Since so many of the claims revolve around Splatoon, popular accounts in the Japanese Twitterverse, and are made either in Japanese or in slightly suspect English, one plausible supposition is that a Japanese maniac with the peculiar brand of fanatical obsessiveness and solitary persistence in which the Yamato race so excels has made it his decade long mission to besmirch the good name of Nintendo with such acts, or else perhaps even believes himself acting righteously in defence of Nintendo marks.

Whatever the case, with a total lack of incentive for anyone to actually investigate the claimant’s relatively elusive Internet presence, it seems unlikely the occasional carnage will cease any time soon.

Another possibility is of course that the claim represents either an attack on the presence of one of the artists featured above or a claim by one or more of them intending to remove works discretely by proxy, but in light of the surrounding claims this seems a less likely possibility.

Certainly, it is beyond belief that Nintendo would actually support the creation of unauthorised lewdness using their characters as in the request, although it is slightly more plausible that they might directly institute a takedown of such material if it broke some unspoken rule.

There is in fact only one well substantiated instance of Nintendo going after a doujin work – in 1999’s infamous “Pokemon doujinshi incident” they had a Japanese woman jailed for three weeks for penning a lewd Pikachu doujinshi – and otherwise it seems their enforcement activities concentrate almost exclusively on fan-made games, ROMs and counterfeit goods.

Sankaku Complex itself is also no stranger to trouble caused by doujin creators abusing the DMCA; virtually the only sort of DMCA request received by the site is from doujin creators who are adamant they own the copyright to unauthorised derivative works produced off of the back of the latest Kadokawa or Nintendo hit, and in recent years the volume of both fraudulent requests and harassment from doujin creators desperate to monetise the works of others has increased, with large platforms such as DMM and DLsite sadly even being complicit in this criminal conduct by sending out such illegal requests on behalf of creators.

However, apart from a single incident involving Paddington Bear, there have been no instances of authentic rightsholders asking for derivative works to be taken down (as is generally their right under both US and Japanese law).

Since the DMCA request received from “Nintendo” is believed to be fraudulent and the work of an impostor, no action is to be taken with regards to it.