Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

YouTube's Content ID system—which automatically detects content registered by rightsholders—is "completely fucking broken," a YouTuber called "Albino" declared in a rant on X (formerly Twitter) viewed more than 950,000 times.

Albino, who is also a popular Twitch streamer, complained that his YouTube video playing through Fallout was demonetized because a Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino's video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called "Done"—which Albino quickly saw was uploaded to YouTube by a musician known as Audego nine years ago.

Enlarge (credit: Bungie)

They wanted to make money by selling cheating tools to Destiny 2 players. They may have ended up setting US legal precedent.

After a trial in federal court in Seattle last week, a jury found cheat-seller AimJunkies, along with its parent company Phoenix Digital and four of its employees and contractors, liable for copyright infringement and assigned damages to each of them. The jury split $63,210 in damages, with $20,000 to Phoenix Digital itself and just under $11,000 each to the four individuals. That's just under the $65,000 revenue the defendants claimed to have generated from 1,400 copies of its Destiny 2 cheats.

Bungie's case appears to have gone further than any other game-cheating suit has made it in the US court system. Because cheating at an online game is not, in itself, illegal, game firms typically lean on the anti-circumvention aspects of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). That's how the makers of Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch, Rainbow Six, and Fortnite have pursued their cheat-making antagonists. Bungie, in taking their claim past settlement and then winning a copyright claim from a jury, has perhaps provided game makers a case to point to in future proceedings, and perhaps more incentive.