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If you've heard of Cookie's Bustle, it's likely because of a long-standing campaign to erase most traces of its existence from the internet. The game, a bizarre point-and-click adventure only released for Japanese PCs, is the Streisand effect personified – but the efforts of the apparent copyright troll who's spent years issuing DMCAs against the mere mention of its name have been stymied by the work of the Video Game History Foundation.
Cookie's Bustle was released in 1999 by a studio known as Rodik. In it, you play as Cookie Blair, a five-year-old girl from New Jersey who believes that she's a teddy bear. A century after aliens land on earth, Cookie travels to Bombo World, the site of the intergalactic crash, to compete in the Bombo World Olympics. Meanwhile, the island nation is suffering political unrest, as terrorists begin to…
Y'know, actually running down the game's plot starts to feel like describing a fever dream, and that's a big part of the charm. An early sequence sees Cookie – who, since she believes she's a teddy bear, appears as a teddy bear – try to board a bus, only to be rejected and left on the sidewalk. Terrorists soon show up, blow up the bus, and are subsequently gunned down by an attack chopper. A later bit has you exploring an ancient temple and stumbling upon the unmistakable corpse of Lara Croft.
Cookie's Bustle is an obscurity among obscurities, but it gained notoriety a few years back when it started making the rounds in various YouTube videos, which offered the perfect showcase of its utterly bizarre sensibilities. That is, until those videos all suffered DMCA takedown notices from a company called Graceware.
Among those interested in sharing Cookie's Bustle with the world was the Video Game History Foundation, which received a "rare physical copy" of the game via a donation. But, as the group explains in an extensive blog post, the company claiming to hold the rights to Cookie's Bustle went after it, too, despite little evidence that they have any connection to it.
"Our efforts to document Cookie’s Bustle were impacted by the actions of an aggressive copyright troll," the VGHF explains. In one instance, the organization "received a takedown from Graceware pointing to a webpage describing that we own a copy of Cookie’s Bustle." Yes, a page describing the fact that the VGHF has a copy of the game in its archives – importantly, not a link to download that game – was targeted for takedown.
This is part of an extensive takedown campaign that's targeted numerous bits of content over the years. Those include pirated copies of the game, yes, but also YouTube videos, screenshots, fanart, a translation mod, and even Discord chat messages discussing the game.
All of it points back to the company Graceware and its owner, Brandon White, neither of which, the VGHF says, have ever provided any proof of their ownership of the rights to the game.
"Based on everything we’ve seen, Brandon White has used low-cost services to make minimally persuasive ownership claims for IP that he may or may not actually have any rights to," the VGHF says. "This strategy extends to the method that White uses to make his takedown requests: by exploiting cheap, abusable resources that have little oversight."
Takedown notices for Cookie's Bustle were issued for Graceware through Ukie, a video game trade organization in the UK. Ukie utilizes an IP management company called Web Capio, which scrapes the internet for potential copyright infringement and fires off automated takedown notices. "Notably, they have bragged that compared to other takedown services, they do not require the majority of their takedowns to be verified by a human," the VGHF says.
The VGHF pressed Ukie IP coordinator and Web Capio owner Mumith Ali to get proof from Graceware or Brandon White of their ownership of Cookie's Bustle, but no such proof was ever provided. "If Brandon White does in fact own the copyright to Cookie’s Bustle, he has not been able to prove it. When asked for documentation to back up his legal threat, he would not produce it. This is not the behavior of someone trying to protect their rights in good faith," the VGHF says.
"Why would someone do this? The blunt answer is that it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether Brandon White is trolling people or whether he has convinced himself that he owns the rights to Cookie’s Bustle. What we were concerned about was stopping this disruptive behavior – period."
With that lack of proof in mind, Ali confirmed that "Ukie has suspended DMCA takedown services for Graceware." Which, as the VGHF puts it, means that "Cookie’s Bustle has finally been freed from copyright troll hell."
"It might seem excessive for us to make a public stand over this one obscure computer game," the VGHF acknowledges. "But this is bigger than just Cookie’s Bustle." Indeed, assuming that Graceware's claim on Cookie's Bustle is spurious, then it's simply an "orphan work" – one whose copyright holder is completely unknown – just like "roughly half" of games released before 1995, the VGHF says.
"As a result, it is uniquely easy for bad actors to muddy the historical record for video games, to sow disinformation about who owns what, and to interfere with the efforts of historians, documentarians, and archivists – and even individual citizen researchers – to celebrate and understand the history of video games."
The VGHF says that "if we care about video games as art and as cultural history, we need to stand up for our legal right to document out-of-print orphan games, and to confront the copyright trolls who stand in the way."
Or, as the group puts it on social media, Graceware "fucked with us, a non-profit organization with a special interest and an expert legal team. Whoops!"
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