Firewatch Devs Filing DMCA Against PewDiePie For Using Racial Slurs
The trouble for PewDiePie just doesn’t seem to end as now he will be facing a new lawsuit by many indie devs. Sean Vanaman the co founder of Campo Santo Studios and the creator of Firewatch has announced on Twitter he and a group of devs will be soon filing a DMCA case against him.
The case comes after Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg who was live streaming his gameplay of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Youtube and during the heat of the moment in the game, he said the N Word due to which he will be facing a DMCA case.
We’re filing a DMCA takedown of PewDiePie’s Firewatch content and any future Campo Santo games.
— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) September 10, 2017
He also made a series of tweet about the situation
“I am sick of this child getting more and more chances to make money off of what we make.”
“He’s worse than a closeted racist: he’s a propagator of despicable garbage that does real damage to the culture around this industry.”
“I’d urge other developers & will be reaching out to folks much larger than us to cut him off from the content that has made him a milionaire.”
“Furthermore, we’re complicit: I’m sure we’ve made money off of the 5.7M views that video has and that’s something for us to think about.”
“Freedom of speech is freedom of prosecution His stream is not commentary, it is ad growth for his brand Our game on his channel =endorsement.”
You can watch the video below which has now spread across all over Twitter and various other social media.
Currently, it is not known if the devs of other games are involved or not but if it is only filled by Campto Santo Devs it can prevent PewDiePie from producing any type of content on any game produced by the studio meaning no live stream or youtube videos.
Though some people were angry on PewDiePie for using the N-Word and were happy that he will be facing a lawsuit. Ian Miles Cheong a Journalist who covers Games and Politics said it a complete abuse of DMCA law. you can check his tweets below
OK, it’s one thing to criticize the guy for misspeaking during his livestream but this is becoming punitive. It always does.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 10, 2017
Cheong also further mentions that Campto Santo’s own website has a rule which states that any Streamer, Video Creators are free to make content and share them and also they can even monetize them.
If you want to get a more detailed analysis of the situation you can check out the video from Lawful Masses With Leonard French who explains the situation very nicely he states that PewDiePie is accountable to what he said but the DMCA case is just the abuse of the law.
Well, this isn’t the first time PewDiePie is facing such situation previously he faced the heat of the main stream media like Wall Street Journal who labeled him as a Racist person due to being in the negative spotlight he has lost both his Disney and YouTube contract.
PewDiePie himself has not made any comment on this situation yet. but his lengthy Firewatch gameplay which received 5.7 million views has been removed from YouTube. The case does remind me of Alex Mauer case who filled False DMCA charges on River City Underground you can read more about it here.