A Judge Has Asked Take-Two How It Identified the GTA 6 YouTube Accounts

A federal judge has stopped one of the four GTA 6 subpoena applications and asked Take-Two a question. Before Google is compelled to identify anonymous YouTube accounts, Judge John P. Cronan wants to know how Take-Two worked out who those accounts belong to, and what its basis is for connecting them to the material at issue. That question is the whole story. Three of the four applications were granted without one. The fourth was met with a request for the company's own homework. What did the judge actually order in the GTA 6 subpoena case? CONFIRMED, editor-verified at CourtListener's Atom feed for the docket, HTTP 200 at 6,717 bytes. Here is the clerk's docket text for entry 5 in 1:26-mc-00425, verbatim, with one redaction of our own that we explain below: MEMO ENDORSEMENT on re: 1 Request for Issuance of Digital Millennium Copyright Act Subpoena, filed by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ENDORSEMENT: 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 REDACTED BY 6CHARTS] Petitioner shall promptly supplement its application with any further information. SO ORDERED (Signed by Judge John P. Cronan on 8/24/2026) (jca) (Entered: 08/24/2026) The redaction is ours and it is deliberate. The original docket text contains a live link to a specific video. Reprinting it would point every reader of this page at allegedly infringing material and at whoever posted it, so we have removed it and we will not reconstruct it. Everything else in that paragraph is exactly as the court published it. Is a memo endorsement a denial? No. Cronan did not deny the application and he did not grant it either. He required supplementation. In the Southern District of New York a judge often disposes of a request by writing directly on the paper that was submitted and having that annotated page docketed. That is a memo endorsement. It is quick, it is ordinary, and it is used constantly for administrative applications of exactly this kind. It can grant, grant in part, modify, or, as here, direct the applicant to come back with more before anything is decided. The word doing the work in this one is "promptly". Take-Two has been told to supplement its application, not told to start again, and not told no. Every image on this page is official Rockstar material. Nothing on this page comes from leaked material, and we did not view any. Why is 1:26-mc-00425 still open when two others closed in a day? CONFIRMED. The four matters have split into two pairs, and the split is visible in the docket metadata alone. CaseRecipientFiledTerminatedJudgeWhat happened on 24 August 1:26-mc-00421Microsoft Corporation, for GitHub20 Aug 202621 Aug 2026order signed by Jennifer L. Rochonnothing, already closed 1:26-mc-00422Discord, Inc.20 Aug 202621 Aug 2026order signed by Andrew L. Carter Jr.nothing, already closed 1:26-mc-00425Google LLC, for YouTube21 Aug 2026not terminatedJohn P. Cronanmemo endorsement requiring supplementation 1:26-mc-00426X Corp.21 Aug 2026not terminatedAnalisa Torresorder granting the subpoena This next paragraph is our analysis and not a fact on the record. The cleanest explanation for why 425 has no termination date is the endorsement itself: the application has not been decided, so the matter cannot close. The record supports that reading and no document says it in terms. Treat it as an inference drawn from the docket rather than as something a court has stated. Note also what 426 shows. The X Corp application was filed on the same day as the Google one, by the same firm, and it was granted on the same day that the Google one was questioned. Two judges looked at two versions of the same paperwork within hours of each other and did different things with it. Have we read the signed page? No, and we would rather say so than let anyone assume otherwise. CONFIRMED: the editor re-fetched the memo endorsement PDF at its predictable free-archive path this morning and received HTTP 404 at 334 bytes. The document is still behind the PACER paywall. What we hold is the clerk's docket text, which is primary, complete and quoted in full above. Docket text of that length is generated from the endorsement itself and is not a summary written by a third party. It is still not the signed page, and if the page carries anything beyond what the clerk transcribed, we have not seen it. Has Take-Two responded to the judge? We cannot tell you, and here is exactly why. CONFIRMED NEGATIVE. We pulled the Southern District of New York's own live ECF feed at 03:03 UTC on 27 August, HTTP 200 at 1,078,233 bytes, lastBuildDate Thu, 27 Aug 2026 03:05:03 GMT, carrying 2,324 items across a rolling 24 hour window. It contains zero matches for any of the four case numbers, zero for Take-Two and zero for Rockstar. No docket activity in any of the four matters in the 24 hours to 03:03 UTC. And the gap, printed because it is load-bearing. Between roughly 21:00 UTC on 25 August and 03:06 UTC on 26 August there is a window that neither CourtListener's feed nor the court's own rolling feed covers for us. If Take-Two filed its supplement inside that window, we would not see it. So the accurate statement is that we have found no supplement on the public record, not that none exists, and certainly not that Take-Two has ignored the judge. Anyone writing that sentence today is writing beyond the evidence. What does the DMCA require before an anonymous account is unmasked? The machinery here is section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act plus Rule 45 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. A copyright owner asks the clerk to issue a subpoena to a service provider for information sufficient to identify an alleged infringer. It is a clerk-issued process, deliberately fast, and it bypasses the ordinary requirement of filing a lawsuit first. Section 512(h)(2)(C) requires the applicant to file a sworn declaration that the purpose of the subpoena is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer. That is the statutory hook, and it is why a judge asking how the applicant identified the personas is a coherent question rather than an obstruction. If the identification method is unexplained, the court is being asked to approve unmasking on trust. Read charitably in both directions, this is the system working. A rights holder is entitled to use the process, and a judge is entitled to ask what it is built on before anonymous people lose their anonymity. Nobody in any of these four matters has been sued, charged, or found liable of anything. What is and is not established Confirmed, editor-verified at CourtListener, HTTP 200 at 6,717 bytes: the docket text of entry 5 in 1:26-mc-00425 is a memo endorsement signed by Judge John P. Cronan on 24 August 2026 requiring Take-Two to supplement its application with information about how it identified the online personas it seeks to subpoena from Google. Confirmed: 1:26-mc-00421 and 1:26-mc-00422 were filed on 20 August and terminated on 21 August, with orders signed by Judge Jennifer L. Rochon and Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. respectively. Confirmed: 1:26-mc-00425 and 1:26-mc-00426 were filed on 21 August and neither carries a termination date. 426 gained an order granting the subpoena on 24 August. Our analysis, not a fact on the record: that the endorsement is why 425 remains open. It is the cleanest available explanation and the record supports it. It is an inference. Confirmed: the signed memo endorsement PDF is still paywalled. Our fetch this morning returned HTTP 404 at 334 bytes. We hold the clerk's docket text and we have not seen the signed page. Confirmed negative: the SDNY live ECF feed, HTTP 200 at 1,078,233 bytes with 2,324 items and a lastBuildDate of 03:05:03 GMT on 27 August, shows no activity in any of the four matters in the preceding 24 hours. Not known, and stated as unknown: whether Take-Two has already supplemented its application. A coverage gap of roughly 25 August 21:00 UTC to 26 August 03:06 UTC is visible to neither feed. We do not say Take-Two has failed to respond. Explicitly not claimed: that anyone connected to these accounts did anything. These are applications for records. No court has found any person liable, and the material at issue is described here as allegedly infringing. Editorial policy: the docket text contains a live video URL. We print it only as a redaction, we do not reconstruct it, and no persona handle, account ID or guild ID appears anywhere on this page. We re-pull all four dockets daily and will publish the supplement, and whatever Cronan does with it, the moment either becomes readable, on our news page. If you would rather spend the wait somewhere more entertaining, our servers list is the place to start.