UPDATE: The same playbook has now surfaced at Take-Two, whose GTA 6 leak enforcement locked a journalist out of X over screenshots of public federal court orders, and struck GameSpot over a screenshot Rockstar hands out to the press. The claim against the journalist was retracted once he pushed back.
Puck News has taken up the Lanterns takedowns.
Tuesday night’s edition of What I’m Hearing, Matthew Belloni’s Hollywood newsletter, handed its main feature to legal columnist Eriq Gardner, and Gardner spent all of it on Warner Bros. Discovery’s copyright campaign against this site.
The piece runs under the headline “The War on Spoilers Goes Nuclear,” in the same issue as Disney’s new lawsuit against the FCC and Ari Emanuel’s win in the Endeavor shareholder case.
Gardner didn’t take our word for anything. He obtained the notices, read them, and landed where we landed on July 10: WBD was not chasing a leaked clip or a misused image.
It was going after people talking about what happens in Episode 1. His assessment of the strategy: “Warners is playing with fire.”
He also reports that WBD has no intention of ever bringing any of this into a courtroom.
The studio wouldn’t comment, though a source familiar with its thinking told him that whether a project has been released yet is among the factors weighed before filing. Which is the point. This was about the calendar, not copyright.
What Puck’s Legal Columnist Adds
Three things in Gardner’s analysis are new to this story, and all three matter.
The timing.
YouTuber Andrew Sosa is suing WBD, alleging the studio used the DMCA to bury his negative review of The Batman. We covered that, too, on June 10.
In May, U.S. District Judge William Orrick refused to throw out Sosa’s misrepresentation claim, found that the speed of the takedown, WBD’s later withdrawal of it, and the apparent lack of any movie footage plausibly pointed to bad faith, and found discovery was needed into how WBD reviews notices before it files them.
That ruling came down weeks before the Lanterns strikes.
A federal judge had just put WBD’s takedown practices under a microscope, and WBD responded by swearing out a fresh round of notices over a rumor.
The comparison.
Gardner also points to Ted Entertainment v. Saber, in which Judge Wesley Hsu held that a nearly four-hour Twitch reaction stream containing all 102 minutes of Ethan Klein’s Content Nuke documentary was fair use as a matter of law.
The entire film, shown start to finish, protected by the commentary around it.
Set that next to a 67-second video of me talking into a camera about a Reddit rumor, with no footage in it at all.
Unequal Stakes.
Gardner is candid about why studios do this anyway.
Section 512(f), the DMCA’s penalty for knowingly false notices, has produced few wins in its history; the good-faith standard is subjective, damages are hard to prove, and cases take years.
The studio, meanwhile, gets its result instantly, and by the time a counter-notice runs its course the premiere, the convention, or the entire leak cycle is over.
WBD’s defense in the Sosa case, per Puck, boils down to this: even if it was wrong that spoilers infringe copyright, being wrong isn’t the same as lying. That is the argument they would make about us, too.
He puts it in a bigger frame as well: producers in India securing court orders against negative reviews, a criminal case in Japan over extremely detailed Godzilla Minus One plot recaps that ended in a suspended prison sentence, and a digital-replica bill in Congress that would hand rights-holders yet another notice-and-takedown lever.
His point to lawmakers: before creating another lever, be sure it can’t be repurposed the way this one was.
What Puck Didn’t Have Room For
Gardner’s column is about how the takedown system is being used; Cosmic Book News is the case study.
That leaves out a lot of the record. Here it is, dated.
The report was sourced, not guessed.
Puck credits us with reading the tea leaves for months and calling the ending by March.
It was more than that. We first raised Hal Jordan’s death in November 2024 and broke down the pulled teaser on March 5.
Then, on March 27, at WonderCon, our insiders told us flat-out that Hal Jordan dies, and we posted it. That’s reporting.
The second X notice.
Puck covers the first notice, filed by a social strategist on HBO Max’s brand team describing the infringement as “people discussing the spoilers.”
It mentions the second only in passing. That one came from a senior analyst in WBD’s Content Protection and Analytics division, the department whose entire job is copyright. Its fields: original work, a link to the show’s IMDb page; reported content, “Text”; infringing material, “Lanterns Season 1 Episode 1 Spoiler.”
The copyright department certified, on a form that spells out federal liability for misrepresentation, that a sentence about a story is Warner Bros. property.
Our post carried an image. They didn’t claim the image. They claimed the sentence.
The still.
The only WBD material anywhere in the X post or the video was an official publicity still pulled from HBO Max’s own press site, which this outlet is credentialed to access, and which is still available for download there today.
Neither X notice claimed the image (Puck uses the same image in their article). One claimed a homepage. The other claimed IMDb.
The Facebook ban was over a video that no longer existed.
Puck notes the Facebook notice didn’t identify who filed it.
It’s worse than that: the rights owner field was blank and the contact email was a literal unfilled template variable, {ip_contact_email}.
We appealed and the video came back.
Knowing a second strike could take the Page down entirely, we deleted the video ourselves.
MarkScan, WBD’s outside enforcement vendor, filed a second notice anyway, this time with the rights owner fields filled in, against a video that was already gone.
That is what put our Page and its 666,000 followers in the dark for 30 days. There was nothing left to remove. The sanction was the point. Meta has since warned the Page’s reach may remain limited.
The window was bigger than Comic-Con.
Puck frames the damage around Hall H.
The 30 days also covered the July 18 Zack Snyder and Frank Miller event at the Wilshire Ebell in Los Angeles, which we covered in person and which kicked off our run of The Dark Knight Returns exclusives: Affleck, Cavill, the storyboards, why Paramount wants it.
All of it went out with our Facebook Page, our largest platform and home to a massive Snyder audience, offline.
Our accounts reach 40 million+ views a month. That is who WBD’s paperwork cut us off from during the biggest stretch of the year.
They walked.
Once we counter-noticed, WBD had until July 24, the day of the Lanterns Hall H panel, to show it had filed a lawsuit. It never did.
YouTube restored the video July 27; X restored the posts July 28 and August 1. Facebook kept the Page dark through August 11 anyway and never replied to counter-notices.
The rumor was right.
The premiere aired August 16. Hal Jordan dies.
Nobody swears out federal takedown paperwork over a rumor that’s wrong, and nobody did.
Where This Stands
Here is what we told Gardner, in full:
“The takedowns cut me off from a large portion of my audience during the biggest week of the year, affected my ability to report on Comic-Con, Lanterns, Snyder/Miller and all the related news, and hurt my bottom line.”
We’re weighing our options. Every notice, counter-notice, restoration confirmation, and screenshot is preserved.
Gardner closes on comic book terms: whether the studio ends up the hero or the villain of this comes down to how it uses its power.
We’d put it more plainly.
HBO Max’s marketing team, WBD’s copyright department, and an outside vendor filed federal paperwork against a journalist for reporting a rumor that turned out to be true, and when the law asked them to stand behind it, they walked.
Puck’s legal columnist just put that on the record.
The strikes were never about copyright. They were spoiler control aimed at a report that was right.
