Sega-owned game company Atlus Co. confirmed today that it attempted to get the Patreon for the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 taken down by invoking its rights to Persona 5 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
What’s especially interesting here is how wide Atlus aimed with its DMCA takedown attempt, shooting not so much to stop people from talking about or emulating Persona 5 on PC but to stop anyone from financially supporting (via Patreon, at least) the RPCS3 emulation group at all.
The company appears to have been only partially successful; in a statement posted today on Reddit, a representative of the RPCS3 dev team claims that on Saturday Patreon (but not the dev team) received notice that Atlus had filed a DMCA takedown against the RPCS3 Patreon page.
Notably, Patreon reportedly pushed back, stating that they believed the emulation group’s work fell under fair use and that the emulator itself did not infringe on any of Atlus’ copyrights. Atlus reportedly retorted that the RPCS3 website gave specific instructions on how “circumvent our DRM protections” by dumping copies of PS3 games so they can be played on an emulator. As of now, the RPCS3 Patreon page is still up but all mention of Persona 5 have been removed from both it and the RPCS3 website.
“In discussion with the very helpful people over at Patreon we have decided to proceed with caution,” the respresentative added. “Per the request of Patreon, we removed every single reference to Persona 5 on the Patreon page itself and rpcs3.net. This seems to have resolved the situation.”
Atlus has a track record of being touchy about the notion of people seeing Persona 5 without paying for it, blocking it from being shared via the PS4’s social features and setting limits (backed up by threat of contentID strikes) earlier this year on how much of the game YouTubers and streamers may show.