A Louisiana judge has ruled that sci-fi writer Casper Cole’s copyright lawsuit against Bungie over Destiny 2’s Red War campaign can move forward, rejecting Bungie’s motion to dismiss.
A judge has ruled that the copyright lawsuit over Destiny 2 is moving forward, despite Bungie’s efforts to get the case thrown out.
Back in 2024, science fiction writer Matthew Martineau—who goes by the pen name Casper Cole—filed a suit against the developer. He claimed that parts of Destiny 2‘s now-removed Red War campaign were lifted directly from his unpublished stories that he had posted on WordPress.
Bungie, in response, argued that the Red War content couldn’t be properly reviewed since the campaign had been removed from the game with the Beyond Light expansion in 2020. David Aldridge, Bungie’s head of engineering, said the campaign’s outdated code no longer worked with the current version of the game, making it impossible to present a side-by-side comparison.
Instead, Bungie offered up some fan-made YouTube compilations and pages from the Destinypedia Wiki as alternative reference material. But the court wasn’t buying it.
According to court documents obtained by The Game Post, a Louisiana judge denied Bungie’s request to dismiss the case on May 2. The ruling stated that since the YouTube clips and wiki pages came from third parties—and weren’t actually mentioned in Martineau’s claims—they couldn’t be accepted as valid evidence.
“The court will not consider exhibits attached to Defendant’s motion to dismiss,” the judge’s statement read. “There has not been sufficient time for discovery and the attachments are admittedly of third-party origination. Their authenticity has not been established.”
Martineau himself criticized Bungie’s submissions, calling the YouTube videos “snippets of third-party derivative works” and saying the Destinypedia content was simply “the work of anonymous Destiny fans randomly uploaded to a third-party site.”
At this point, it’s not totally clear what’s next. But for now, Martineau’s lawsuit is alive and well, and his claims are strong enough to keep things moving.
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