SK Telecom T1 had filed takedown requests on videos showing players

It looks like SK Telecom T1 tean has admitted filing takedown requests against videos of its players’ in-game highlights, claiming that such videos were “damaging” to its players.

Last week a Reddit user, “Catfish_BILLY”, posted that he’d received copyright takedown requests under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) for YouTube videos he had posted featuring in-game footage of SKT players. These videos did not feature the SKT players’ personal streams or content, just in-game footage—something which the SpectateFaker fiasco in 2015 established was clearly the copyright of Riot Games.

In that case, a service which streamed in-game spectating of SKT star Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok came under attack from Riot Games from Azubu. At the time, Azubu had the exclusive rights to the streams of SKT players, but did not own the copyright to the in-game footage. That belonged to Riot Games—but because of what Riot called “the potential material harm” to players, it backed Azubu and took down the stream. Riot founder Marc Merrill famously described the stream as “harassment and bullying.”

When Catfish_BILLY first posted his story, some were doubtful that the real SKT were actually involved. A threatening email he posted that claimed to be from SKT appeared fishy, and the name of the user that filed the takedown was not the same as the official SKT YouTube account.

SKT has now confirmed in a statement that it was behind the move. According to the team, the unofficial highlight videos confused fans, and caused financial damage to SKT players in terms of what they could earn from their own content. While the statement apologized for taking down the videos for which SKT did not directly own the copyright, saying they did so “without fully understanding” the copyright issues involved, the team confirmed it would continue to try and take down these videos by requesting Riot Games issue takedown notices on them.(Source:dotesports)