Denuvo has spent a decade as the thing PC players argue about rather than the thing that sues them. That changed on 14 September, when Denuvo GmbH filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against an anonymous defendant it knows only as voices38, plus ten unnamed Doe defendants. The filing runs to sixteen pages, names twenty-six specific games whose Anti-Tamper protection it says the defendant stripped out, and asks the court for an order that would reach games that have not been announced yet.
Denuvo is suing on its own behalf, not for the publishers
The plaintiff is Denuvo GmbH, the Salzburg-based company behind Anti-Tamper; a corporate disclosure filed the same day identifies Irdeto B.V. as its parent. Crucially, Denuvo does not own the copyright in any of the games at the centre of the case. It is not suing for copyright infringement at all.
Instead the complaint rests entirely on the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Count One alleges a violation of 17 U.S.C. section 1201(a)(1) - circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. Count Two alleges a violation of section 1201(a)(2) - offering, providing or otherwise trafficking in a technology whose primary purpose is circumventing such a measure. That second count is the one aimed at instructions and tools rather than at the act of cracking itself, and the complaint alleges the defendant's materials have "no commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent Denuvo's Anti-Tamper."
Section 1203 lets any person injured by a section 1201 violation bring a civil action, which is how a security vendor gets into court over games it did not make. The complaint pleads that the defendant has "otherwise injured Plaintiff's goodwill and business reputation." Denuvo describes the defendant in the filing as "a computer hacker who is focused on reverse engineering, hacking, or 'cracking' video games employing Denuvo's Anti-Tamper product."
The twenty-six games named in the complaint
The filing works through the games one at a time, in near-identical paragraphs, each naming the title and its publisher. In order, they are: Need for Speed Heat, EA Sports FIFA 20, Star Wars: Squadrons, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, EA Sports FIFA 21, Hi-Fi Rush, F1 2021, Dead Space Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages, Mafia: The Old Country, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Hogwarts Legacy, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Shining Resonance Refrain, PES 2020, Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Anno 1800, Sonic Frontiers, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade and 007 First Light.
It is a strange mix, and the mixture is the point. A large block of the list is Electronic Arts catalogue material from 2019 to 2021 - two FIFA entries, two Need for Speed games, a Star Wars flight sim, an F1 season, a Dead Space remaster. Alongside them sit some of the biggest Denuvo-protected releases of the last two years, including Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, Game Science's Black Myth: Wukong, Shift Up's Stellar Blade and IO Interactive's 007 First Light. Publishers implicated across the list include EA, Bethesda, 2K, WB Games, SEGA, Ubisoft, Konami and Capcom.
None of those publishers is a party to the case. They appear only as the owners of the works whose protection Denuvo says was bypassed, which is what gives Denuvo its section 1201 hook.
How the filing describes the defendant
Denuvo does not claim to know who voices38 is. The complaint identifies the defendant by pseudonym and then lists the online footprint it has assembled: a username and numeric user ID on Discord, an account on Reddit, and seven Steam Community profiles it says are associated with the same person or entity.
Those platforms also do the work of establishing venue. The complaint argues the Northern District of California has personal jurisdiction because the defendant disclosed circumvention methods on Reddit and used Discord to facilitate further circumvention - both companies are headquartered in the district - and because several of the affected works are owned by Electronic Arts, which is headquartered there too.
What Denuvo is asking the court to order
The prayer for relief is where the case gets unusual. Denuvo wants temporary, preliminary and permanent injunctions restraining the defendant, its agents, and anyone acting in concert with it from "circumventing Denuvo's Anti-Tamper in any past, present, or future video game," and from manufacturing, offering, distributing or trafficking in any tool built for that purpose. An injunction phrased that way would cover titles that have not been written, let alone released.
On money, the complaint asks for actual damages plus the defendant's profits under section 1203(c)(2) or, in the alternative, statutory damages under section 1203(c)(3). It also asks the court to order an accounting of all profits received from the alleged violations, to declare that the defendant holds those profits in constructive trust for Denuvo, to impound any materials involved in the violations under section 1203(b)(3), and to award attorneys' fees and costs. A jury has been demanded.
Where the case stands now
The docket has moved quickly for a case against someone with no name. The complaint was filed on 14 September with a 405 dollar filing fee and logged as a copyright matter. The case was assigned the following day to Magistrate Judge Nathanael M. Cousins, with consent or declination to magistrate jurisdiction due on 29 September. A summons was issued as to Voices38 on 16 September, and the court has already set an initial case management conference for 16 December by videoconference in San Jose, with a case management statement due a week earlier.
The obvious hurdle is service. You cannot hand a summons to a Discord handle, and the ten Doe defendants in the caption are the standard placeholder for names a plaintiff expects to learn later - typically through subpoenas to the platforms where the accounts live. Whether Denuvo pursues that route, and whether Valve, Reddit or Discord hold anything that resolves to a person, is the part of this case worth watching. Everything else in the filing is settled law; identifying the defendant is not.
