Take-Two’s hunt for the GTA 6 leaker is now sweeping up journalists, and the first claim anyone bothered to challenge has already collapsed.
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.
A DMCA notice is a copyright complaint under federal law, and platforms act on them almost automatically, because pulling the content immediately is what shields the platform itself from being sued over it.
Remove first, ask questions never.
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.
Two days later — within a day of Totilo emailing to ask why — the claim was retracted, his images were restored, and X told him his account was in the clear.
Neither Take-Two nor Ebrand, the Poland-based “online brand protection” vendor that filed the notice, has said a word.
A Trademark Complaint On A Copyright Form
The notice, which Totilo published, isn’t really a copyright claim at all.
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.
The orders themselves are the ones we covered on August 22: DMCA subpoenas — a shortcut in the law that lets a copyright owner get a court-ordered demand forcing a company to unmask an anonymous user, no lawsuit required — aimed at Microsoft and Discord to identify whoever is behind Cyberleek.
Judges Jennifer L. Rochon and Andrew L. Carter Jr. signed them on August 21. Totilo posted them at 6:48 p.m. that evening. Five days later, the screenshots were infringing.
GameSpot Got Struck Over Rockstar’s Own Screenshot
Totilo’s post was one of 300 flagged in the same bulk filing.
Some of them fit the mission: an account posting a university location from the leaks, another sharing an early look at Jason pulled from Extended Look footage that hadn’t aired yet.
Then there’s GameSpot.
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.
Grok got one too. X’s in-house AI was flagged for replying to a user’s question; its answer identified one of the clips as a genuine Cyberleek leak.
And the sweep runs wider than X.
Per TorrentFreak, Take-Two has since sought additional DMCA subpoenas covering X and YouTube accounts, while its Discord demand reaches thousands of users, including people whose only connection is having been in servers where clips were shared, and some named accounts that appear to be impostors.
The Same Machine WBD Aimed At Us Over Lanterns
If this reads familiar, it’s because we just lived it, and Puck News covered it.
In July, Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO Max ran the same play over Lanterns: strikes on posts that contained no footage, a copyright department claiming a one-sentence spoiler as studio property, a Facebook notice with the rights-owner field left blank, and a second strike against a video that had already been deleted.
When we filed counter-notices — the sworn response that gives the claimant roughly two weeks to file an actual lawsuit or the content comes back — WBD never sued, and everything was restored.
A federal judge is separately letting a lawsuit proceed over WBD’s takedown of a negative Batman review, and has ordered discovery — the phase where the studio has to open its internal records — into how its notices get reviewed before they’re filed.
Now Take-Two’s contractor has produced the same result on a faster clock.
The claims go out in bulk, the platforms comply in minutes, the damage lands on whoever got swept in, and the paperwork only gets read when a target pushes back.
Totilo pushed back, and the strike evaporated overnight.
Take-Two has a real case against Cyberleek: a real breach, real judges, real subpoenas. That half is legitimate.
The other half is a vendor certifying to the federal government that a judge’s signature is a video game logo.
Nobody at Take-Two or Ebrand has explained how that happened. They didn’t have to. They hit retract and moved on to the other 299.
