UPDATE: A second X strike has landed — this one from WBD’s actual Content Protection department, designating the infringing content as “Text.” [Full story here.]
UPDATE 2: YouTube has forwarded our counter-notification to the claimant — Warner Bros. Discovery, via MarkScan. Under the DMCA, they now have 10 US business days to provide evidence they’ve filed a lawsuit against us, or the video is reinstated and the strike comes off our channel. That deadline lands on or around July 24 — Hall H day. Live updates on X.
UPDATE 3: Meta has now restricted our account from managing our 666K-follower Page for 30 days — through Aug 11, covering all of Comic-Con — over the copyright claim whose notice named no rights owner. Our counter-notification remains pending. The Page is dark; the reporting isn’t.
The Lanterns takedown campaign is no longer an X problem.
Within hours of HBO Max’s own social team being revealed as the filer behind Thursday’s strikes, the sweep reached two more platforms: Warner Bros. Discovery’s outside enforcement vendor hit the Cosmic Book News YouTube channel with a copyright strike, and Facebook pulled the same video off our page entirely.
The target on both platforms is a single 67-second video: me, on camera, discussing our article on the Hal Jordan death leak, over screenshots of our own article and our own social media post.
A 67-Second Commentary, Claimed In Its Entirety
The YouTube strike came from MarkScan Enforcement, filing on behalf of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., with the claimed content listed as “Lanterns.” According to the claim, the WBD content is found in the “entire video.”
The entire video is original commentary.
The only Warner-owned material visible at any point is the official press still, appearing inside a screenshot of our article and partially covered by our own text overlays.
By MarkScan’s accounting, a journalist talking into a camera about his own reporting is, start to finish, Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property.
The strike is live for 90 days, and YouTube’s math is unforgiving: three strikes and the channel is removed, along with any associated channels.
That’s the position a news outlet now occupies two weeks before covering this company’s biggest panel of the year. We have filed a counter-notification and requested a retraction from MarkScan directly.
Who Is MarkScan?
MarkScan is the India-based anti-piracy outfit WBD pays to police its content online, and its track record is its own genre of story.
In 2023, a MarkScan notice got the Downloader app — a bare-bones web browser with 50 million installs — suspended from Google Play. Asked to identify the copyrighted work being infringed, the notice said only “Properties of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.”
Where it was supposed to identify the infringing content, it listed warnerbros.com, the app’s offense was being able to load Warner’s own homepage.
Google eventually reversed the suspension, noting the notice failed to identify any actually infringing content. The vendor’s greatest hits run long enough that Techdirt maintains a dedicated MarkScan tag page.
That is the enforcement operation now deciding whether a news channel survives premiere season.
Facebook’s Notice Names Nobody
The Facebook removal of the same video came with its own twist.
The notice states the video was removed over a third-party copyright report and that “the removal decision was made by our technology.”
Then comes the section identifying the complaining party and Facebook’s suggested path for resolving the dispute. The rights owner field is blank. The contact email reads, literally, {ip_contact_email} — an unfilled placeholder in Facebook’s own template.
So the official remedy is to contact the complainant directly, and the official notice declines to say who that is. We filed an appeal instead.
Three Platforms, One Day
Keep the running tally.
Friday morning, the Hal Jordan leak hits Reddit. By afternoon, HBO Max’s brand social team has filed a DMCA notice sweeping six posts across five X accounts — fans, a review account, and this outlet — locking our account and describing the infringement as “people discussing the spoilers.”
Hours later, the vendor pipeline reaches YouTube and Facebook, aimed at one minute of commentary.
Two separate tracks — a marketing team filing by hand, and an enforcement vendor’s automation — converging on press coverage the same day, over the same story.
Counter-notifications are now filed on every platform, retraction requests are with both the social team and MarkScan, and the restoration clocks all land in roughly the same place: Comic-Con week.
In the meantime, Cosmic Book News will not run Warner Bros. Discovery promotional materials while the company files takedowns against our coverage.
Official images have been pulled from our Lanterns articles and replaced with our own; the reporting stands on its own just fine.
Nobody runs a three-platform takedown campaign over a rumor that’s wrong.
The Lanterns Hall H panel is on Friday, July 24.
Lanterns premieres Sunday, August 16 on HBO and HBO Max.
