 We're on our road to 100,000 subscribers. If we get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out, we'll be giving away a collector's edition of Tears of the Kingdom, a Tears of the Kingdom special edition Switch OLED. We'll give it away one of those exclusive pins from PAX East and more. I got more giveaways than the works. The giveaways haven't begun yet, folks. We're not at 100,000 subscribers yet. I'd also just appreciate if you would go ahead and turn on the bell notification. And so it's all notifications so you guys get notified of every video we upload. And today we have a breaking piece of news for you regarding Tears of the Kingdom. And this is because Nintendo is pissed off. This isn't shocking that they're mad, but this does confirm this was clearly an unintentional leak. Remember that art book leak? Well, we have some news on it because Nintendo is, they're bringing the hammer. They're not necessarily going after everyone's still talking about it and leaking little images here and there from it. No, no, no, no, no. So don't worry, they're not coming after us or other YouTubers. They are, however, trying to go after the original sources with massive lawsuits. Holy crud. Let's get into the story. It comes off at torrentfreak.com. It says Nintendo hunts down Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leaker on Discord because that's where it really started the spread was on Discord. So Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom will release on Switch in May, but some fans have already been enjoying an unreleased special edition art book since February. As Nintendo tries to plug the leak, legal documents obtained by torrentfreak indicate that the video game company has homed in on a specific Discord user and is now trying to obtain their identity. As Nintendo's official website for Switch game, The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom states, the adventure begins on May 12th, officially at least. The hotly anticipated sequel to The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild will go on sale next month in digital and physical formats with the latter also available as a special collector's edition. Targeted at Zelda connoisseurs, the special edition includes The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, physical version, an art book, a steel bookcase, a steel poster, and a set of four pin badges. Now, there was a pre-release leak back in February of 23. On February 20th, 2023, Eurogamer reported that a 200 page art book had been leaked online containing details of new characters, enemies, enemy types, and new locations. It's currently unclear how this art book managed to leak so far in advance of Tears of the Kingdom's official launch date, the publication noted at the time. Two months later, it's clear that A, Nintendo is very aware of the leak and B, they have a specific internet user in mind as the potential leaker. So they then sent a DMCA takedown to a Discord server. On February 21st, Nintendo of America sent a DMCA notice to Discord. The complaint targeted a Discord channel name Tears of the Kingdom official Discord server. The notice went on to target six specific URLs featuring images or links to images. Nintendo's copyright protected, unreleased special edition art book for the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom video game in violation of Nintendo's rights. Just eight minutes after the takedown notice was sent to Discord, the platform acknowledged the complaint and told Nintendo that the content will be removed promptly. Now, this is Discord themselves responding. Around 10 hours after sending the initial takedown notice, Nintendo followed up with a request for immediate review and takedown of the entire Discord channel, noting that members were still distributing the pre-release artwork using direct messages and links. Additionally, some members have been assigned the role of the PDF Pirate, which identifies them as a source for the PDF files of the infringing art book images. For your review, we have also provided screenshots from the server featuring four members and a brief description below highlighting their activity in the server. Now, of note, I have all the art book images on my computer that came pretty obvious over the years when I talked about this or over the last month or two when I talked about it. However, I have never redistributed those. I'm not gonna say how I got them. I'm also not gonna redistribute them. That's never been my intent. I know how illegal it is to redistribute copyrighted material in that way. So as you see on here, one of the direct download links and all this, we're not gonna provide obviously a link to that. We'll link to the torrentfreak.com website though. Around 18 hours later, Discord said that it issued a warning to the server for reported activity. In its original notice, Nintendo had objected to the term official being used in the server name as the server is not operated or authorized by Nintendo, which that's fair. That would be like me saying I'm the official, you know, Nintendo Switch channel. That obviously would not sit well with Nintendo because that would indicate this channel is part of their company. We're not, we're a fan channel. Anyways, Discord said that if Nintendo was concerned about potential consumer confusion, it might want to file a trademark complaint. So Discord going out there saying, hey, technically from a legal perspective, you don't own the word official so while it might be confusing, it's not legally incorrect. I could argue it's morally incorrect. Anyways, Nintendo has now gone to court in California. On Friday, April 4th, 2023, Nintendo of America's attorneys filed an application for a DMCA subpoena at District Court in California. Representing the notices sent to Discord in respect to the copyright protected unreleased special edition art book for the Legend of Zell and Tears of the Kingdom, the company highlights a Discord channel and a specific user. Nintendo of America is requesting the attached proposed subpoena that would order Discord Inc. to disclose the identity, including the name, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses of the user, Julien hashtag 2743, who is responsible for posting infringing content that appeared at the following channel, Discord channel, Zell of the Tears of the Kingdom. And always requesting the attached proposed subpoena, et cetera, et cetera. So there's just the image of the legal case. Information available on other platforms, Reddit in particular, suggested the person Nintendo is hoping to identify is the operator of the Discord channel and at least potentially the person who leaked the original content. So this person they're going after might be the original source. Now they might not be the person who took the images, maybe they are the one who took the images, but they are the one that at least took those images and put them online. It is unclear at the moment obviously how those images were taken and why this person chose to share them. Let's say it was a friend who worked in manufacturing that sent them the images. They probably were sent in confidence that they wouldn't share them and just enjoy them privately. If this is the original source. Again, we don't know. Nintendo's doing their investigative work at the moment. A two month old comment on the original leak suggests the source was a long time friend. A comment in response questioned why someone would get a friend fired for internet brownie points. And then obviously there's a link to Nintendo's DMCA subpoena. If you want to look into all the legal mumbo jumbo regarding this. What's very obvious here is Nintendo's pissed off. Now I have been in talks with some people behind the scenes about this kind of stuff. And Nintendo is pretty angry about it. Now they have calmed down a little bit over the last month. They realized that pretty much none of us YouTubers talking about it or showing a piece of art here or there are to blame. We're not the ones that are spreading it behind the scenes. We're not sharing it with anyone. We're not doing anything that they would deem illegal. We're just talking about something that exists which is a protected right. So Nintendo, they're not really doing much about the content creators right now because as long as we're not the one sharing links to content, we're not distributing it in that way. We can discuss its existence. We can show teaser images from it. Even this article on Torrent Freak has a teaser image in it from the thing. Like you're allowed to do that for reporting reasons but yeah, it's a lot different than obviously sharing the entire 200 page art book PDF with links to everything. So what I will say is Nintendo's obviously mad and what they're doing at this point is because they can't stop the fact this is out there. The art book isn't that hard to find if you really just wanna find it online. Maybe you don't trust the websites you have to go to to find it but it's out there. What you need to understand though is Nintendo isn't necessarily interested in doing anything about this leak right now. They know they can't shut it down. It's too late. What Nintendo is interested in doing though is setting an example. What they want to do is come after the original source of the leak so hard that anyone who ever gains access to early Nintendo property again thinks twice before saying anything. And we're not talking about things like oh, you know what, there might be a Nintendo Direct happening this week and this month. Those kind of leaks are oh, you know what Nintendo might be working on a remaster of Thousand Year Door or something. We're not talking about those kind of leaks. Nintendo doesn't want the official media leaking out there. That's what Nintendo has a problem with. This art book leaking three months before the game comes out is definitely something Nintendo never wants to happen again. It is arguably the largest leak of its kind in Nintendo history. And Nintendo just wants to set an example. And if I'm going to be completely honest about this as much as I've enjoyed covering the art book and all that stuff, I gotta say I really hope Nintendo gets the original leaker. I just, I have to say, and I've sort of said this from the beginning, if this wasn't an intentional leak and I had a feeling it might have been because it was such a massive leak, how could it have not been intentional? So now that we know pretty much definitively this was not an intentional leak, I do hope Nintendo gets the original leaker. I think that this person who did it was doing it for clout, brownie points, et cetera, potentially getting their friend fired. If I had to guess their friend who worked at Nintendo or worked in manufacturing, probably sent those images to them in confidence. You know, let's say I happen to know someone at Nintendo of America and they happen to send me a few gameplay clips of tears of the kingdom. If I wanted to blow up as a YouTuber and chase internet clout, I could talk about those clips and share those clips online. And then I would blow up, right? Like it'd be huge. Oh man, look at this guy who's got access. But you know what would also happen? The friend who sent me those would get fired. There is something to be said about wanting to protect your friend who is just being nice to give you access to something early, but then yeah, just getting them in lots of trouble. I think that is a problem. I think that is something that should not happen. And unfortunately it did in this case and while the rest of the internet now talking about the art book and putting images up isn't at fault anymore and Nintendo seems to be over that, Nintendo does want to discourage this behavior in the future. And the only way to do that is to come down hard from a legal perspective. So I encourage Nintendo to continue to pursue this. And honestly, you know, I hate to say it, but the guy has it coming. Does Julian, if that's who they are, if it's not like a fake username, whoever it is, if this is the originating source or if finding this person leads them to find the originating source. Cause maybe they aren't the originating source. Maybe it's like a torrent website online or something. I don't know. But at least this is the trail Nintendo has narrowed it down to, a Discord user in North America that are hoping to trace back to wherever this came from. If Nintendo hasn't already figured out which employee leaked it. Cause obviously in order to have it leaked at all, it had to be someone who had access and then this user decided to share it online. So they're gonna come after the user and obviously they'll come after the employee who leaked it privately. That being said folks, I am Nathan DeRoller, J.S. from Nintendo Prime. Let me know what you think about this development down in the comments below.