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Take-Two's Leak Takedowns Caught a Retailer and a Reporter
Defending an unreleased game against a genuine leak is legitimate. An enforcement process that removes a retailer’s use of official press assets and a journalist’s screenshots of public court filings is not working properly.
Following the August 2026 leak of unauthorised Grand Theft Auto VI footage, Take-Two moved quickly. Through outside counsel it filed DMCA subpoenas against Discord and Microsoft on 19 August, and against X Corp and Google on 20 August, seeking account details, registration emails, IP logs and device identifiers tied to accounts distributing the material.
That is a normal response to a real problem. What happened alongside it is the story.
The GameStop post
On 20 August, a takedown notice connected to the campaign hit a GameStop social media post. The image in it was an official Rockstar press screenshot — material Rockstar itself had published, for precisely the purpose of being reposted by retailers.
The journalist's account
On 26 August, a notice sent through a brand-protection vendor, invoking trademark rather than copyright, briefly locked the X account of games journalist Stephen Totilo, who publishes Game File. The post that triggered it contained screenshots of publicly filed court orders. No leaked game content of any kind.
The account was restored and the claim withdrawn after Totilo objected. Neither Take-Two nor the vendor commented publicly.
Why this matters beyond the two incidents
Automated or near-automated enforcement at this scale produces errors, and the errors fall on people with no practical way to contest them quickly. A retailer and a well-known reporter both got it resolved. Someone without an audience would not have.
It also has a chilling effect that is hard to measure and easy to underestimate. When a trademark notice can take down screenshots of a public court filing, the message received by everyone watching is that reporting on this subject carries a risk that reporting on other subjects does not.
None of this makes the underlying leak acceptable, and none of it means Take-Two should not act. It means the instrument is blunt.
Where we stand. This site reports on leaks as events and does not host, embed or detail leaked material. That is our own editorial line, set before any of this — explained in full here — and it is about the value of a source you can trust as much as it is about the law.
Sources
- Take-Two’s leak-burying DMCA attempts snared GameStop and a gaming journalist — Techdirt, 4 September 2026.
- Take-Two expands GTA 6 leak hunt with DMCA subpoenas — TorrentFreak, August 2026.
Every factual claim above is labelled as confirmed or unconfirmed and traced to the source listed here. Where Rockstar has said nothing, this page says so rather than filling the gap.