The GTA 6 Discord Order the Docket Does Not Describe

There is an order in the Take-Two Interactive subpoena file that the public docket does not describe. Docket entry 10 in case 1:26-mc-00422-ALC, filed on 31 August 2026, has no description text at all. The row on the docket page shows a date, an entry number and a link, and nothing else. Pull the PDF and it is a signed order from Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. granting Take-Two a second DMCA subpoena to Discord, Inc. Anyone monitoring that case by reading the docket would have seen a blank line where a ruling is. Before any of it, the frame, because it goes missing in almost every retelling. None of this is a lawsuit. A subpoena under section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an ex parte identity-disclosure mechanism. There is no defendant, no complaint, no adversary and no finding that anybody infringed anything. Microsoft, Discord, Google and X Corp. are recipients of process, which is to say custodians of records who have been asked for them, and not one of them is accused of anything. Take-Two has sued nobody. There is no complaint and no named defendant on any of the four dockets. We have covered the shape of these proceedings before, in our report on the second Discord application and in our reading of the return dates off the subpoena forms, and nothing below changes that frame. The blank docket entry, and what the PDF says CONFIRMED, read in full from the source PDF. The CourtListener docket page for 1:26-mc-00422 was fetched at 03:01:52 UTC on 3 September 2026, HTTP 200, 116,617 bytes. Entry 10, filed 31 August 2026, carries an empty description field. The row offers only "Main Document", "Order" and "Download PDF". The document itself was pulled from RECAP storage at 03:02:46 UTC, HTTP 200, 103,409 bytes of PDF, one page. Its header stamp reads verbatim: Case 1:26-mc-00422-ALC Document 10 Filed 08/31/26 Page 1 of 1 The caption reads In re DMCA Subpoena to Discord, Inc., Case No. 1:26-mc-422, ECF Case. The title reads verbatim: ORDER GRANTING PETITIONER TAKE-TWO INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE, INC.'S SUBPOENA TO DISCORD, INC. And the operative sentence, verbatim, is one line long: ORDERED that the clerk of this Court shall issue the Subpoena for Discord, Inc. as sought by the petitioner. It is dated 8/31/26 and signed by the Hon. Andrew L. Carter, Jr., United States District Judge. The docket metadata around it: assigned to Andrew Lamar Carter Jr., date filed 20 August 2026, date terminated 21 August 2026, date of last known filing 31 August 2026, and a RECAP last-updated stamp of 31 August 2026 at 7:10 p.m. What "granted" means, precisely. The clerk will issue the subpoena. That is the whole of it. It is not a finding of infringement, not a ruling on the merits, and not an adjudication of anything. Discord is not a defendant, has not been accused of anything, and has not been sued. The order says nothing about whether anybody must actually produce anything and nothing about the merits of Take-Two's investigation. Discord is nonetheless the only recipient in this campaign facing two separate subpoenas, and the second was authorised on the last day of August. That is the fact the blank docket line hides. Take-Two's own description of what it is investigating The order at entry 10 resolves a sealed application filed on 28 August. The letter motion supporting that application, docket entry 6, is public, and it is the clearest statement in the entire record of what Take-Two says it is chasing. CONFIRMED, read from the filed PDF, fetched at 03:03:12 UTC on 3 September, HTTP 200, 500,198 bytes, three pages. It is on Kirkland & Ellis LLP letterhead, 601 Lexington Avenue, New York, signed Dale M. Cendali, P.C., and addressed to Judge Carter at the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, 40 Foley Square. Page two, verbatim: The Subpoena Attachment reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two's confidential information. Read the second half of that sentence carefully. "The misappropriation of Take-Two's confidential information" is a materially broader description than copyright infringement, and it comes from the company's own counsel, under signature, to a federal judge. Copyright infringement concerns the copying and distribution of protected work. Misappropriation of confidential information is a different family of claim entirely. Take-Two has filed no such claim against anybody, and this sentence is a description of an investigation rather than a cause of action. It is still the broadest characterisation of the investigation that exists in public. Page three, verbatim, is the evidence-destruction argument: Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two's ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two's investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement, creating a substantial risk that the infringers will delete, destroy, or otherwise conceal evidence of their infringing activities, and/or take further steps to evade identification. Page one is explicit that the request is narrow, verbatim: Take-Two seeks only to seal the Subpoena Attachment, not any other portion of its request or the Subpoena. The letter relies on four authorities, which we list because they show what standard Take-Two is arguing to: Lugosch v. Pyramid Co. of Onondaga, 435 F.3d 110, 120 (2d Cir. 2006); Diversified Grp., Inc. v. Daugerdas, 217 F.R.D. 152, 163 (S.D.N.Y. 2003); Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A. v. Sunny Merch. Corp., 97 F. Supp. 3d 485, 511 (S.D.N.Y. 2015); and CRC Ins. Servs., Inc. v. Suh, 2025 WL 560749 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 19, 2025). These are allegations in a sealing brief and they are not court findings. No court has found that anyone misappropriated anything. The word "infringers" is Take-Two's word for people who have not been named, charged, sued or heard from, and who have had no opportunity to respond. Nothing in the record identifies who they are, and this desk is not going to speculate. The date on the letter does not match the date in its own header A small documentary oddity, recorded because it is the sort of thing that produces a phantom timeline later. The letter is dated August 28, 2026 on page 1. The running header on pages 2 and 3 reads August 27, 2026. Both strings are in the filed PDF. The docket records the filing as 08/28/26. This is almost certainly a template that was not updated when the letter went out a day later than drafted. It has no legal effect and it is not evidence of anything improper. We print it because a scraper reading page two of that document will report a 27 August letter, and anyone reconciling that against the 28 August docket stamp will think there are two documents where there is one. The Google withdrawal, in Take-Two's exact words The fourth proceeding, 1:26-mc-00425-JPC, is the one that went the other way, and we reported the closure last week. The full text of the withdrawal letter is now readable, and it is worth printing because it says considerably more than "withdrawn". CONFIRMED. Document 6, filed 08/28/26, one page, and Document 7, filed 08/31/26, one page, being the same letter bearing Judge John P. Cronan's memo endorsement. Both fetched at 03:03:12 UTC on 3 September, HTTP 200, at 130,944 bytes and 284,177 bytes. The letterhead is Ruttenberg IP Law, A Professional Corporation, Los Angeles and White Plains, signed /s/ Rachel Bandli, dated August 28, 2026. The subject line reads verbatim: "In re DMCA Subpoena to Google LLC, No. 1:26-mc-00425-JPC / Response to Memo Endorsement (Dkt. 5)". Verbatim, on the state of the investigation: 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. Verbatim, on the withdrawal itself: 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. Verbatim, and this is the sentence most coverage has skipped: 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. Judge Cronan's endorsement is stamped on the face of the letter, verbatim: "The Clerk of Court is respectfully directed to terminate all pending motions and to close this case." Followed by "SO ORDERED", August 31, 2026, signed John P. Cronan, United States District Judge. What prompted the withdrawal is on the docket at entry 5, filed 24 August 2026. The docket text, verbatim except for one elision we explain below: 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. SO ORDERED The elision is ours and it is deliberate. The order carries a single YouTube URL on its face. It is a court-published identifier of a video, not of a person, and nothing in the record establishes who posted it. This desk does not link or reproduce identifiers pointing at material alleged to be unauthorised, so we have taken it out and told you we did. WITHDRAWN IS NOT DENIED. Judge Cronan never ruled on the merits of the Google application. He asked a question, Take-Two withdrew before answering it, and he closed the case. Take-Two did not lose, and it did not win. It walked away from the one application where a judge pushed back and asked how it had identified the accounts, and it told the court in writing that it may return. Any story treating the Google matter as closed for good is overstating the record. Google LLC was never a defendant and is not accused of anything. Everything else on these dockets is silence CONFIRMED as a negative finding, from all four dockets read at 03:01:52 UTC on 3 September, all HTTP 200. There is no return of service anywhere, no motion to quash, no appearance by any recipient, and no order resolving the 28 August sealing motion. Entry 8 in the Discord case remains marked sealed and unavailable. All four proceedings carry the cause "M 08-86 Internet Infringement" and all four list exactly one party, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. There is no opposing party on any docket. A RECAP search restricted to this district and to filings after 20 August returned a count of exactly four, which is to say the four proceedings already known and nothing else. Searches for "Rockstar Games" and for "Take-Two Interactive" filed after 25 August returned zero in every court. Six days of nothing. That is entirely normal for a section 512(h) proceeding, where recipients typically respond directly to counsel rather than to the court, and where a recipient producing, objecting or negotiating generates no docket entry at all. The limits, stated as limits. RECAP mirrors PACER and it lags. Every statement above is as of the snapshot timestamp quoted and not as of live PACER, which this desk did not access. The X Corp. docket, 1:26-mc-00426-AT, shows no termination date on CourtListener even though its subpoena was granted on 24 August, and its snapshot is the stalest of the four at 30 August. Treat that as a mirror artefact rather than an unresolved application. Absence of a docket entry is not proof that nothing happened. What is and is not established CONFIRMED, read in full from the source PDF: Judge Carter signed an order on 31 August 2026 at docket entry 10 of 1:26-mc-00422-ALC directing the clerk to issue a second subpoena to Discord, Inc., and the docket description field for that entry is empty. CONFIRMED, from the filed sealing letter: Take-Two's counsel describes the investigation as concerning copyright infringement "and the misappropriation of Take-Two's confidential information", and argues that disclosure creates a substantial risk that evidence will be deleted, destroyed or concealed. CONFIRMED as a documentary fact: that letter is dated August 28, 2026 on page 1 and carries a running header reading August 27, 2026 on pages 2 and 3. CONFIRMED, from the filed withdrawal letter and its endorsement: Take-Two told Judge Cronan it "no longer needs the particular information requested", described the situation as evolving rapidly, and expressly reserved the right to submit a new request. Judge Cronan closed the case on 31 August. CONFIRMED as a negative finding, as of the RECAP snapshots read at 03:01:52 UTC on 3 September: no return of service, no motion to quash, no appearance by any recipient, no order on the sealing motion, and no fifth Take-Two DMCA proceeding in this district. Not a lawsuit: all four proceedings are ex parte identity-disclosure applications. Granted means the clerk will issue the subpoena and nothing more. Withdrawn is not denied. Microsoft, Discord, Google and X Corp. are recipients of process and not defendants. Take-Two has sued nobody, and there is no complaint and no named defendant anywhere. Explicitly not claimed: that any court has found that anybody infringed or misappropriated anything. The characterisations above are Take-Two's advocacy in its own filing. Explicitly not claimed: that any recipient has been served or has produced anything. A Rule 45 return date is counsel's demand date printed on a form, not a court order. Explicitly withheld by us: the contents of every exhibit attachment, which our researcher did not open, and the YouTube URL on the face of the 24 August order, which we removed from our quotation. Method limits printed as limits: RECAP mirrors PACER and lags, live PACER was not accessed, the X Corp. snapshot is four days stale, and CourtListener rate-limited one search with an HTTP 429 which was retried after a pause. Our running ledger of what is established about this game, as against what is circulating, is on the wiki, and the rest of today's filings and storefront work is on the news desk. If court records are not what you came for, the servers list and the leaderboards are open for the next 77 days.