Take-Two is unmasking the GTA 6 leaker with §512(h) subpoenas — four in two days

Unreleased GTA 6 gameplay surfaced online on 18 August under the alias “Cyberleek”, branded with a crypto-token advert. Take-Two’s answer was not a lawsuit. Between 20 and 21 August its counsel filed four DMCA subpoena petitions in the Southern District of New York: against Discord and Microsoft (20 August, Kirkland & Ellis), then against X Corp. and Google (21 August, Ruttenberg IP Law), the latter naming three Cyberleek accounts.

Why it matters

§512(h) is the DMCA’s identification instrument: on a copyright owner’s petition, the court clerk — not a judge after full litigation — issues a subpoena compelling a service provider to disclose “information sufficient to identify the alleged infringer”. It is fast, cheap relative to a John Doe suit, and available to any rights holder, not only publishers with a billion-dollar release.

The filings also show the instrument’s limits being tested in real time. The Discord request seeks identifying details for every account in three named servers since 1 June — thousands of users, most with no tie to the leak. The X and Google petitions, filed a day later by different counsel, name three specific accounts. Overbreadth is the classic ground on which §512(h) subpoenas get challenged and narrowed; the two approaches sitting side by side in the same docket week make the contrast unusually visible. Notably, per the docket, the judge has directed issuance but the clerk had not yet issued the Discord/Microsoft subpoenas as of 23 August — media reports of “issued subpoenas” run ahead of the record.

What this means for you

When your unreleased build, footage or internal material leaks through an anonymous account, takedown notices remove copies — §512(h) finds the source. The sequence Take-Two ran is available at any scale: takedowns to contain the spread, then clerk-issued subpoenas to the platforms holding the account records. The filing burden is a valid copyright claim in the leaked material and a request drawn narrowly enough to survive a motion to quash — name accounts, not communities.

Counsel’s note — Most leak victims stop at takedowns and never learn who leaked. The other mistake is the Discord-style dragnet: ask for everyone, invite a quash fight, lose weeks. The working method is the narrow petition — specific accounts, specific records, filed while the platform still retains the logs. Retention windows, not court speed, are usually what kills identification; move within days, not months.