from the ready-fire-aim dept

Take-Two’s Leak Burying DMCA Attempts Snared GameStop & Gaming Journalist That Did Nothing Wrong

I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don’t think any of this was some attempt to Streisand what is perhaps already the most anticipated game of all time into wider news coverage, and that is backed up by the DMCA blitz Take-Two has gone on to try to bury all of these leaks.

Those attempts shouldn’t surprise anyone, honestly. Take-Two and Rockstar have historically abused copyright law to try to bury all kinds of content it doesn’t like, whether it’s been game leaks in the past, or cheats for its games, or mods it doesn’t like.

But it sure would be nice if the partners Take-Two has doing the abusing of the law could bother to be somewhat accurate and not ensnare a gaming journalist for the crime of posting publicly available court documents.

On August 26, Stephen Totilo — the longtime Kotaku editor-in-chief who now runs the Game File newsletter — was locked out of his X account over a DMCA notice filed on Take-Two’s behalf. Totilo’s offense, by his own account, was an August 21 post reporting that judges in New York had cleared Take-Two to subpoena Microsoft and Discord in the leak hunt.

Attached were three screenshots: the two court orders, and a tweet from Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet pledging Microsoft is “working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games.” No leaked footage. No gameplay. The orders are public records that never once use the words Grand Theft Auto.

After Totilo complained both to ExTwitter and on ExTwitter, his account and the original tweet were restored and the DMCA claim had been rescinded. There is no indication that Take-Two or the vendor it was using to police the internet for these leaks have said anything publicly or privately to Totilo. They just nuked his account over a bullshit claim that ten seconds of review would indicate contained no infringing material, then restored it when the mistake was called out, and now are trying to Homer Simpson back into the bushes as though nothing happened.

But what makes this all the more frustrating is that the DMCA notice doesn’t make a copyright claim. It appears to make a trademark claim, instead.

It asserts Take-Two’s international figurative trademark on Grand Theft Auto — a trademark on the logo — and argues there is a likelihood of confusion, the legal test for whether the public might mistake someone else’s goods for the brand’s.

In plain English: a copyright takedown form was used to make a logo complaint, against images that contain neither the logo nor a single frame of the game.

The notice describes the reported content — federal court orders included — as “video/audiovisual recording,” and certifies all of it as accurate under penalty of perjury, the line that makes knowingly lying on the form a federal offense.

Everyone in this portion of the story, save Totilo, sucks at their jobs. Take-Two has clearly partnered with a company, Ebrand, that is not up to the task of properly policing IP on the internet. Ebrand messed this up badly, asserting a trademark claim via a copyright mechanism. ExTwitter, for its part, apparently demonstrated just how little review is done on this sort of thing, having taken down the tweet and suspending a journalist’s account over this absolute mess of a DMCA claim. It’s a full cornucopia of stupid on display for the world to see.

And this isn’t a one-off. Gamestop was also ensnared in Take-Two’s DMCA blitz. Its crime appears to be sharing a promotional screenshot for GTA6 that Rockstar specifically made available for use publicly.

Its August 20 post promoting a story on the billions in market value Take-Two shed as the leaks spread got struck, and the image X wiped was Rockstar’s own official GTA 6 screenshot, straight from the press gallery on Rockstar’s site.

That exact shot has run on dozens of outlets since May 2025, IGN and Mashable included. Take-Two’s vendor filed federal paperwork against a promotional asset Rockstar distributes so that outlets will use it.

There is simply no point to the DMCA’s “under penalty of perjury” language if it can’t be employed in a situation like this. At the very, very best, Ebrand and Take-Two are guilty of unbelievable negligence in issuing these DMCA takedowns and copyright strikes. When we’re talking about even temporary takedowns of the work of journalists, the First Amendment implications become obvious.

To allow these companies to simply slink away without penalty is why this sort of thing keeps happening. If there are no consequences to a carpet-bomb approach to copyright (trademark?) takedowns, then they will, and do, continue.