This is a case of using copyright law to achieve something that has nothing to do with copyright, and that is identifying a large number of people, with no judicial scrutiny.
And this is not even about identifying those accused of copyright infringement, but of those who happen to be in the same "virtual room" where copyrighted material was shared.
This is the story of a copyright holder going to a US court with a DMCA subpoena, which is then used in a fishing expedition to get personal data of thousands of users, in a process that is often described as a dragnet.
This is an old tactic, but the scale here seems to be significant.
For one thing, the leak in question was a major one, of gameplay footage from the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, but that was just the beginning, as the person or persons behind the leak also had a political and business agenda, and even a cryptocurrency to promote.
And so the video went viral, despite Rockstar Games' best efforts to take it down with DMCA takedown notices. The game is not out yet, it's due in fall 2026, and the company was clearly trying to control the narrative around it, especially since the leak happened before the game's "Extended Look" was to be released on Netflix.
But before that, Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, went to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, to try to at least contain the fallout by identifying those behind the leak, and those who had simply discussed it in a chat.
The four DMCA subpoenas were filed this month and were meant for Discord, Microsoft, X, and Google.
Take a look at it here.
And while all this is based on the controversial US copyright law's DMCA Section 512(h), the scale at which this is being done is the shocking part.
One of the Discord servers in question has over 107,000 members, and while it is not clear if Take-Two is going after each and every one of them, the request does say "all identifying information associated with all user accounts" that were or are members of three named servers since June 1 – and that participated in a conversation in those servers.
The three X accounts that are the subject of another subpoena were previously flagged by the GTA fan community as impostors, and the real leaker had marked subsequent videos as "CYBERLEEK DOES NOT HAVE TWITTER." All three accounts are now suspended.
Another filing targets three YouTube channels, and the last one seeks records from Microsoft's internal investigation into the leak, along with IP logs and device identifiers.
None of the four subpoenas have been issued, and the targeted platforms can still resist them, and the users in question can try to have them quashed.
The DMCA is increasingly being used as an identification tool, with companies brazenly using it in wide application to try and unmask users, not just use it strictly for the removal of copyrighted content.
In this case, Take-Two Interactive's one filings make it clear that they're not limited to whoever is uploading the leaks, they're targeting entire communities and channels that are merely existing in the same Discord server as those alleged leakers.
This is now the pursuit of a membership list under the color of the enforcement of copyright. While it can be crushed if people push back, there's actually nothing about the DMCA process that discourages this in a strong enough way.
To file a claim is cheap and quick, and the compliance cost falls on the platforms. There was a time when companies would at least try to maintain the guise that their targets were limited to infringement but, these days, they're getting more brazen and now hitting anyone who happens to have been standing nearby.
