Copyright trolling kept evidence of Japanese cult classic Cookie's Bustle offline, until now

You may not have heard of Cookie's Bustle. That's partly because it's an obscure Japanese point-and-click released by a small studio called Rodik in 1999. It's also because of the efforts of a copyright troll, who kept playthrough videos, screenshots, fan art, and even Discord mentions of Cookie's Bustle offline for years.

Cookie's Bustle has finally been brought to light thanks to the efforts of the Video Game History Foundation, which recently documented its victory in preserving Cookie's Bustle in the face of claims by a company called Graceware. As the VGHF posted on Bluesky, "For years, Graceware has gotten away with abusing the DMCA because they've targeted large platforms that comply quickly with takedowns, or individuals without the resources to push back. Then they fucked with us, a non-profit organization with a special interest and an expert legal team."

First, what is Cookie's Bustle? Well, it's a game about a five-year-old girl who has been transformed into a teddy bear, who travels to a South American island nation with the unlikely name of Bombo World to take part in a sporting competition. It gets weirder from there. Aliens are involved, there's a song in what is allegedly English, and Cookie does jail time.

Let's Play videos of Cookie's Bustle, like this recently restored one from Vinesauce, were regularly taken offline following Graceware's DMCA complaints, with little in the way of pushback. Until, that is, the VGHF obtained a physical CD-ROM of Cookie's Bustle and began adding it to their digital archive, including a three-and-a-half hour longplay video. When they received the inevitable takedown notices—three of them—they pushed back. As the saying goes, if you come for the VGHF, you best not miss.

VGHF library director Phil Salvador's exhaustive article shows that Graceware's claim of owning the Cookie's Bustle copyright—it's technically an "orphan work" because Rodik no longer exists and nobody from the studio has been contactable—is based on registrations for the source code, game concept, and character designs lodged with an organization called Interoco. But as Salvador put it, Interoco is "effectively a digital version of mailing yourself a letter to get it date-stamped by the Post Office, a comparison that INTEROCO explicitly makes on their About Us page."

It's simply an official-looking name that looks good on a letterhead, like those of the DMCA notices sent to the VGHF, including one for a page that simply mentioned the organization now owned a physical copy of Cookie's Bustle. "This page explicitly says that the game files are 'Not Available' and does not show any copyrighted material—even images—yet it was still targeted for a takedown," Salvador says. "Graceware seems to be suggesting that non-profit archives even describing the existence of the game Cookie's Bustle is copyright infringement."

Graceware also applied for a trademark on the name Cookie's Bustle in December 2022. "Since then," Salvador writes, "they’ve had to file four extensions on their deadline to prove that they have actually used the name 'Cookie's Bustle' in commerce."

The VGHF legal team contacted Ukie, the organization sending takedown notices on behalf of Graceware, and pointed out their lack of validity. "We're not sure exactly what transpired between Ukie and Graceware," Salvador says, "but it sounds like Graceware was unable to provide sufficient proof of their ownership. We hoped this would persuade Ukie to take action—and it did."

Ukie will no longer be providing its automated DMCA takedown service to Graceware, and the internet has responded with fan art and video clips of the strangest parts of Cookie's Bustle. My favorite is one that was stricken from YouTube, though it managed to dodge the takedown notice when it was posted to BlueSky in July, simply showing what happens when Cookie tries to catch a bus in this baffling game. What a loss it would be if oddities like this couldn't be documented.