Take-Two Withdrew Its Google Subpoena Bid, and the Judge Closed the Case Today

On 21 August, Take-Two Interactive asked a federal court to make Google hand over the identities behind three YouTube accounts it linked to a leaked Grand Theft Auto VI video. On 24 August, the judge asked Take-Two a question before he would sign. On 28 August, Take-Two answered by withdrawing the request. Today, 31 August, Judge John P. Cronan closed the case. That sequence is unusual enough to be worth reading carefully, and it is also unusual enough to be misdescribed within hours. So, before anything else, the two sentences that this article exists to keep straight: the court did not reject Take-Two's application, and Take-Two did not lose. The court never ruled on the merits at all. Take-Two pulled the request before it had to answer the question, and it expressly reserved the right to come back. What Take-Two actually asked for CONFIRMED, from the docket read at source. The case is In re DMCA Subpoena to Google LLC, number 1:26-mc-00425-JPC, in the Southern District of New York, filed 21 August 2026 and assigned to Judge John P. Cronan. We read the CourtListener docket page at HTTP 200, 90,916 bytes, at 2026-08-31T23:31Z, and the operative filing at HTTP 200, 284,177 bytes, at 23:32Z, extracting the text with pypdf. This is not a lawsuit, and that distinction does real work throughout this story. A subpoena under section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an ex parte administrative mechanism. A copyright owner asks a court clerk to compel a service provider to identify an alleged infringer. There is no defendant. Nobody has been sued. Nobody has been accused in a filed complaint. The only thing at stake in the proceeding is whether a name gets handed over. The application sought the identities behind three YouTube personas, named in the public filing as CyberLeeks, Surfer24k and CyberLeek_ar_io, which Take-Two associated with a video containing material it says is its copyrighted work. We name those three because a public court record names them, and we repeat that no person has been sued, identified or accused of anything on this record. The question the judge asked, and the answer he did not get On 24 August, Judge Cronan declined to sign the application as filed and issued a memo endorsement. We covered that request when it was docketed. Its operative sentence, quoted here only as the context for what followed: Petitioner has not provided any information as to how it identified the online personas that it seeks to subpoena from Google, including its basis for believing that those users are associated with the posting of [URL removed by us]. Petitioner shall promptly supplement its application with any further information. The redaction in that quotation is ours and we are flagging it rather than hiding it. The judge's sentence contains the URL of the allegedly infringing video. This desk does not print routes to unauthorised material, and a court quoting a link does not change our rule. The words that matter are the ones around it: the court wanted to know how Take-Two got from a leaked video to three specific account names, and it was not prepared to issue the subpoena without that showing. Take-Two did not make that showing. On 28 August, through Ruttenberg IP Law, counsel Rachel Bandli, it filed a letter that says, verbatim: Take-Two's investigation into the individual(s) responsible for posting infringing content on YouTube, and elsewhere online, has been (and is) evolving rapidly as new information becomes available. Take-Two has been working to provide the Court with the additional information requested, but as this very dynamic situation has progressed, Take-Two has determined it no longer needs the particular information requested. Thus, Take-Two respectfully withdraws its subpoena request. Should Take-Two determine that its investigation requires the information it originally sought from Google LLC (or new/additional information), it will submit a new request for the Court's consideration. Read that closely. It says the investigation is moving quickly, that Take-Two was working on an answer, that it has decided it no longer needs what it asked for, and that it may be back. It does not say why it no longer needs the material, and it does not address the judge's question about how the three accounts were linked to the video. The order that closed it, today CONFIRMED, filed today. Judge Cronan endorsed that same letter with a short order: The Clerk of Court is respectfully directed to terminate all pending motions and to close this case. SO ORDERED August 31, 2026. That is the whole disposition. No findings, no reasoning, no ruling on whether the application would have succeeded. A miscellaneous proceeding that was opened on 21 August was closed ten days later without the question at its centre ever being answered. What this does and does not mean What it establishes. Take-Two's YouTube and Google identity track is closed, and it closed unresolved on the merits. Take-Two never told the court how it linked those three personas to the video. It withdrew instead of supplementing, and it did so four days after being asked. What it does not establish, and this is where most coverage will go wrong. A withdrawal is not a denial. Judge Cronan never held that Take-Two lacked a basis for the request, and nothing in this record suggests it did. Companies withdraw applications for many ordinary reasons, including obtaining the same information another way, or determining it is no longer needed. The filing gives none of those reasons and neither will we. We are not going to speculate on why Take-Two no longer needs the material, because the document does not say, and a guess dressed as analysis is still a guess. It also establishes nothing whatsoever about the three personas. Their identities were never disclosed. Whether they are one person or three, whether any of them has any connection to the material at issue, and whether any of them overlaps with the accounts in Take-Two's separate Discord filings, are all questions this record does not answer. And it is not the end of the Google track. The letter reserves the right to file again in terms, and a new application would open a new proceeding rather than reviving this one. The same day, a different judge, the opposite outcome The withdrawal did not land in isolation. On the same day this case closed, in the same courthouse, a different judge granted Take-Two a second subpoena to Discord in a separate docket, with the list of targets under seal. We have written that up separately on the news desk. Taken together, the two orders describe a company narrowing its aim rather than abandoning it, which is a considerably duller and more accurate reading than either "Take-Two backs down" or "Take-Two cracks down". One more thing worth recording, because it is the kind of absence that gets misreported as significance. Researcher C ran a full-text search of SEC filings across the two weeks to 31 August for any mention of this litigation and found zero hits. Take-Two has disclosed nothing about the leak, the subpoenas or the investigation in its securities filings, and its most recent quarterly report contains only generic language about routine litigation in the ordinary course of business. That is entirely normal for proceedings of this size. It also means the docket is the only place any of this exists on paper. What is and is not established CONFIRMED, from the docket read at source at 23:31Z and the filing at 23:32Z: Take-Two withdrew its DMCA section 512(h) subpoena application against Google LLC on 28 August, and Judge John P. Cronan directed the clerk to close case 1:26-mc-00425-JPC on 31 August. CONFIRMED, verbatim: Take-Two's letter states it "has determined it no longer needs the particular information requested" and expressly reserves the right to submit a new request. The distinction this article exists to protect: withdrawn is not denied. The court made no ruling on the merits and made no finding against Take-Two. Explicitly not claimed: that Take-Two lacked a legitimate basis for the original application. Nothing in the record supports that, and the company chose not to litigate the point rather than losing it. Explicitly not speculated on: why Take-Two no longer needs the information. The filing does not say. Not established: anything at all about the identities behind the three named personas, or any link between them and any other proceeding. Nobody has been sued, named as a defendant or accused in a filed complaint. Not the end of it: a refiling remains open, and the parallel Discord track is active and was escalated the same day. Redaction disclosed: we removed the allegedly infringing video's URL from the judge's quoted memo endorsement, under this desk's standing rule against printing routes to unauthorised material. The rest of this desk's coverage of the leak proceedings, including what the subpoenas actually demand and who gets swept into them, is on the news desk, and the running record of what is established about the game itself sits on the wiki.