Genshin Impact is now taking legal action to uncover the identity of Ubatcha, one of the anime game‘s most well-known leakers. The RPG’s publisher, Cognosphere, has also sent Discord a DMCA takedown notice that aims to remove leaked content from the relatively large Wangsheng Funeral Parlor Discord server. As such, other leakers have been wiping their social media pages over the past few days to avoid similar consequences.
Ubatcha is actually the admin of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor server – a community hub that currently hosts over 270,000 members. The discussions inside have to do with more than just Genshin leaks, but the specific channel may get wiped completely if Discord doesn’t comply with Cognosphere’s DMCA takedown notice.
As reported by TorrentFreak late last week, Cognosphere allegedly issued a subpoena to Discord for “Ubatcha’s name, address, telephone number, and any email addresses connected to the Discord account Ubatcha#2791.” Discord has not complied as of the time of writing.
Presumably, this information will be used to take further legal action, which is precisely what HoYoverse has done in the past. A clear example of this came when the company banned and fined a leaker USD $78,000/GBP £63,829 for revealing early footage back in version 2.5. And earlier this year, Genshin Impact cheat makers received jail time for selling cheat software.
A few other prominent leakers have seemingly disappeared and ended all early info-sharing in the days following Cognosphere’s actions. So, as a result of previous repercussions, Cognosphere has essentially sent warnings to many others at the same time.
Genshin Impact version 3.3 goes live this week and the version 3.4 closed beta will start soon, which makes the timing of this leak crackdown unsurprising.
It’s rumoured that the highly-anticipated Alhaitham release and Hu Tao rerun are coming alongside Yaoyao in 3.4, so the seriousness of this DMCA situation will likely dissuade future leakers in the next few weeks.