The professionals have entered the chat.
One day after HBO Max’s brand social team filed DMCA strikes over “people discussing the spoilers”, Warner Bros. Discovery’s actual copyright enforcement department has filed a second notice against the Cosmic Book News X account, and this one claims the infringing material is text.
Specifically, per the notice itself: “Lanterns Season 1 Episode 1 Spoiler.”
Not a leaked clip. Not an image. A spoiler. As words.
This Time It’s Not The Marketing Department
The first notice was the amateur hour that locked our account Thursday: filed by a social strategist, work identified as a homepage, content type mislabeled.
This one came from a senior analyst in WBD’s Content Protection and Analytics division, out of the Burbank lot, on Home Box Office’s behalf, wrapped in the full corporate boilerplate, the template that invokes the entire WarnerMedia family, from DC Comics and HBO down to CNN, Hanna-Barbera, truTV, and Latibaer ehf., the Icelandic company behind LazyTown.
All of it was deployed against a tweet about a Hal Jordan rumor.
Which closes the door on the most charitable reading of this week. This is no longer one marketing employee freelancing with a legal form. The department whose entire job is copyright reviewed the situation and filed more paper — making the same claim, more formally.
‘Reported Content: Text’
Read the notice’s own fields. Reported content: “Text.” The original work: a link to the show’s IMDb page — a third-party database entry, following Thursday’s identification of hbomax.com, the homepage. What was located as infringing: “Lanterns Season 1 Episode 1 Spoiler.”
Copyright protects expression: the footage, the script, the words as written. It has never protected facts, and “what happens in Episode 1” is a fact about a story.
A news post reporting that a rumor exists copies nothing from any work. That is not a close call; it is the first page of the doctrine, and a content protection analyst certified the opposite under penalty of perjury, on a form that includes its own acknowledgment of federal liability for material misrepresentation.
One detail says everything about what this filing was actually for: our post carried an image. The notice didn’t claim it. They claimed the sentence.
Two Departments, One Tweet
The new notice sweeps four posts — including two accounts not previously hit — and one that was: a @G_O_A_T_Lantern post already struck in Thursday’s filing.
Two different Warner Bros. Discovery departments have now filed separate federal takedown paperwork against the same tweet, two days apart.
The running tally across both notices: ten URL entries, seven accounts, two departments — fans, archive accounts, a review account, and a credentialed news outlet, all over one Reddit rumor.
Add MarkScan’s YouTube strike and the anonymous Facebook removal, and the campaign now spans four platforms and three separate enforcement channels.
Two Strikes On A Press Account
This is the second strike on the Cosmic Book News X account in two days, and X’s notices come with standing language that repeat violations can end in suspension.
That is the position of a news outlet’s primary distribution channel eleven days before covering this company’s biggest panel of the year.
We have filed our second counter-notification and sent a retraction request directly to the analyst who filed the notice.
Between the two X counter-notices, the YouTube counter-notification, and the Facebook appeal, every restoration clock now lands in the same place: Comic-Con week.
The Spoiler They Keep Confirming
Sit with what the notice calls the protected material one more time: “Lanterns Season 1 Episode 1 Spoiler.”
Warner Bros. Discovery’s copyright department has now put in writing that there is a Season 1 Episode 1 spoiler, and that it warrants federal paperwork.
The leak said two timelines, the Manhunters, and Hal Jordan dead at the end of the premiere. We said Hal dies back at WonderCon in March. Six takedowns and two departments later, nobody has once suggested the rumor is wrong.
Official WBD promotional materials remain off our Lanterns coverage while the strikes continue. The Hall H panel is Friday, July 24. We’ll be in the room.
Lanterns premieres Sunday, August 16 on HBO and HBO Max.
