Zelda Streamer Accidentally Banned On Twitch For Streaming Press Preview Footage

Nintendo’s DMCA takedown led to a prominent content creator temporarily banning her Twitch account for broadcasting publicly available Zelda footage.

Sony Santa Monica Content Writer and Content Creator Alanah Pearce tweeted that her Twitch account was suspended during the broadcast because she was reacting to a Tears of the Kingdom preview video by Skill.

While some players were sharing screenshots of Kingdom Tears from a leaked copy of the game, the SkillUp screenshots were part of a Nintendo-sanctioned preview event in Australia where they were allowed to take screenshots.

As such, Pearce was effectively suspended from Twitch for streaming Tears of the Kingdom that had already been pre-approved by Nintendo.

“Lol, Twitch just got suspended in the middle of a stream because I was reacting to SkillUp’s Zelda preview video,” Pearce tweeted. “Looks like the Nintendo DMCA made me watch certified Zelda gameplay.”

In a comment in a separate window YouTube video Explaining the situation, Pearce added that Twitch informed her that it was Nintendo that passed the DMCA, not SkillUp or another third party.

Pearce was able to dispute the takedown with Twitch as a false DMCA, after which her account was unbanned.

The incident is one of many DMCA takedowns Nintendo has issued, as the release date for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom approaches.

The game was leaked online at the beginning of May, and Nintendo has been trying to combat the situation ever since, not only by taking screenshots of the game but also trying to block players from accessing tools that might allow them to play the pirated versions.

As I mentioned Kotakuthe company issued multiple DMCA takedown requests to software hosting service GitHub, to remove a homebrew tool designed to enable Switch gaming on an emulator.

Lockpick is a tool that allows gamers to dump the unique encryption key from their Switch so it can be used to run backups of Switch games on PC emulators.

While some gamers claim it’s legal to create their own backups—something Nintendo nonetheless disputes in takedown claims—one step to playing pirated Nintendo Switch games involves downloading someone else’s encryption key, a number of which are available for download online.

GitHub currently lists the DMCA takedown request from Nintendo as 81 separate cases were removed from repositories storing copies of Lockpick. It also lists several other DMCA takedown requests to remove encryption keys from the site.

The team working on the Switch Android emulator Skyline also announced that it had received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo, due to its use of the Lockpick.

As mentioned in the now removed Discord post (reported by Nintendo Live), the Skyline team has now halted all development on the emulator “due to the potential legal risks involved”.