Alex Mauer Copyright Claim Abuse

Agati · July 19, 2017

Because this story is quite long, I will try to give you a short version. There is a lot of information out there, so if you want to learn more about this, please do your own research because I might have missed something or interpreted it incorrectly.

I first heard about this story from SidAlpha, a youtuber who makes video about gaming news and industry analyses. He managed to get in contact with TotalBiscuit so that the story would get heard by more people. Leeonard French who represents Imagos also made a few videos about this, and I both Leonard French and SidAlpha got death theats from Alex Mauer in the process.

Alex Mauer was hired by Imagoes to make the sound effect and/or music in the games Star Mazen and River City Ransom Underground. She had some sort of falling out with the company and claims she never signed any documents (her coworker did), therefore Imagoes does not own what was made and put into the game. In what could only be called a attempt to get publicity around this, she decided to manually file DMCA takedown notices on any video she could find on Youtube that had gameplay video in it. Everything from reviews to lets-play videos; affecting over 100 Youtube channels.

After some time Alex Mauer realized that flagging all of the videos at once would only yield a single strike to a channel, she decided to take away some of the claims, just to reclaim then again on channels that had more than a single video. This made it so that Youtubers who had made a few videos about these games could and would get taken down by the Youtube system.

Alex Mauer was taken to court by Imagos and given a restraining order against filing anymore DMCA takedowns, and the legal battle between the two parties are currently ongoing.

Both Destructoid and ArcTechnica made stories about this, but they decided they wanted to side with Alex Mauer in their stories. Both have updated or changed their entire article after posting it after other news outlets called them out on it.

Articles can be found here:

https://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Jonathan+Holmes/river-city-ransom-underground-taken-off-steam-due-to-dmca-claim-449177.phtml

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/07/dmca-takedown-takes-river-city-random-underground-off-steam/?comments=1

GamingReinvented and OneAngryGamer acticles about the misreporting:

https://gamingreinvented.com/news/destructoid-covers-alex-mauer-writes-hilariously-biased-story/

http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/07/gamergate-destructoid-updates-article-after-misreporting-alex-mauer-dmca-case/35232/

Vidoes covering the subject in more detail:

TotalBiscuit:

youtu.be/077d3hAvwQ4

Leonard French:

youtu.be/nuSZ6wZAaHQ

youtu.be/ryWjMNVb3sI