In February, someone leaked more than 200 pages of the artbook for the upcoming "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom": TorrentFreak (opens in new tab) reports that Nintendo has filed a DMCA subpoena with Discord, asking it to reveal the identity of the user who shared the images The report states.

The image was only temporarily uploaded before Nintendo sent its initial DMCA takedown request, and Discord responded very quickly, taking only eight minutes according to the report, promising to remove the artbook content. A few hours later, Nintendo also requested that the channel "Tears of the Kingdom Official Discord Server" be taken offline.

Not surprisingly, that was not the end of the story: on April 7, Nintendo's attorneys filed a subpoena seeking the true identity of Discord user Julien#2743, "including his name, address, phone number, and email address" who posted content on the Discord channel. The company filed the application with the U.S. Attorney's Office. According to the application, this information will be used "for the purpose of protecting the rights granted to NOA (Nintendo of America) under the Copyright Act." Since the infringing content has already been removed, one can only assume that Nintendo is trying to set an example.

This is not the first time a gaming company has called in lawyers to pursue a Discord user: in December 2022, Cognosphere, publisher of Genshin Impact (opens in new tab), the famous Ubatcha known as doing the same thing to find out the identity of the leaker. And unfortunately for Julien#2743, as noted in that article, Discord is unlikely to be able to resist this request: such floundering is a formality to ensure that the companies involved are fulfilling their legal obligations.