Sega DMCAs SteamDB Despite That Site Not Hosting Any Pirated Material

Sega has something of a flip-floppy history when it comes to how restrictive the company chooses to be with intellectual property generally and DMCA takedowns more specifically. The company notably went DMCA happy back in 2012, for instance, over a bunch of fan videos on YouTube for Shining Force, all because it had a planned release for a PSP version of the title. In 2013, the company actually half-apologized for doing so, promising to be more lenient with what it allows, though there were caveats expressed as well. Fast forward to 2016 and Sega quite gleefully poked some fun at its rival, Nintendo, for its DMCA blitzes, instead encouraging fans to make and create cool and fun stuff with some of its IP.

Well, here we are in 2021, and Sega once again is in the news, in this case for a DMCA takedown sent to the SteamDB site.

As SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik shared on Twitter Monday, Sega's lawyers asked that the site and its host take down a page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The takedown request alleges that SteamDB is distributing or linking to pirated copies of the game, even though a quick glance at an archived version shows that's not true.

That page, like every other on SteamDB, simply compiles historical data on pricing, concurrent players, and other statistics from Steam's own API and public store pages. While there is a link to install the game near the top, that link directs users to Steam itself, which will attempt to install a legitimate copy if the user owns it.

Just so everyone is clear, SteamDB has literally nothing to do with piracy of games. Instead, SteamDB compiles a ton of interesting statistics about games on Valve's Steam platform. Oh, and SteamDB also pushes visitors looking at game statistics to the totally legit place to buy them on Steam. Unfortunately, due to the either automated way some publishers police piracy of their games, or due to an ill-informed legal team tasked with issuing DMCA notices, SteamDB gets the occasional DMCA takedown request. It's yet another example of how hard policing this sort of thing is, where the actual publishers of these games are doing a ready-fire-aim DMCA approach. In this case, the SteamDB page for Yakuza: Like a Dragon was taken down, though it appears that was rectified afterwards.

Sega has provided the following statement to Ars Technica: "Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. Sega will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly."

It's not terrible as far as apologies go for this sort of thing, but there is something unfulfilling about a message of: "Hey, you were collateral damage, too bad, so sad." Mistakes like this aren't world-ending, certainly, but they are a nuisance for innocent parties to endure simply because policing copyright infringement at scale is apparently an impossible task.