The company is searching for leakers ahead of GTA’s November release.
Rockstar Games
Take-Two, parent company of developer Rockstar Games, is taking legal action to find whoever is responsible for leaking footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, according to Kotaku. The company filed two petitions for subpoenas in the Southern District of New York to get Microsoft and Discord to hand over information Take-Two has identified as being associated with the leak.
In the case of Microsoft, the company is looking for information related to a GitHub repository that allegedly hosted Take-Two’s copyrighted material, including “audiovisual content, artwork, images, dialogue, or other creative elements.” The company is specifically asking Microsoft to hand over “business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the ‘cyberleek’ persona.”
For Discord, Take-Two is asking for information on several different accounts and servers, including Discord users CYBERLEEK, CINEMATICROCKSTAR and Surfer24k; a Discord server run by GTA V content creator DarkViperAU; and another server called !Odyssey. Kotaku writes that Take-Two is asking for all identifying information related to the accounts, including things like their full names, phone numbers, any accounts they’ve linked to and any content they’ve shared related to Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar or Cyberleek.
Footage of GTA VI started leaking earlier this week on August 18, and Take-Two quickly sprang into action, issuing takedown requests to keep information about the game from being shared. Despite the company’s best efforts, leaks of the game continued to spread, including new videos that suggested Cyberleek, the leaker or group associated with the footage, had a working build of the game. Before the footage spread online, Take-Two and Rockstar planned to offer an “extended look” at GTA VI through an exclusive streaming deal with Netflix on August 27.
This isn’t the first time GTA VI has leaked. In 2022, footage of the game was shared by an 18-year-old member of the hacking group Lapsus$, bizarrely via an Amazon Fire TV Stick. After a mental health assessment determined the hacker was unable to stand trial and that he intended to return to cybercrime if he was released, a judge sentenced him to an indefinite hospital order.
