Five days sat between the post and the lockout [17]. That gap rules out the excuse operators usually reach for, which is that automated systems move too fast for anyone to check. Something sat in a queue for most of a week, and at no point in that week did the queue contain a person who opened the three attachments and read them [4].
The notice that came out the other end asserted Take-Two's international figurative trademark on the Grand Theft Auto logo and argued likelihood of confusion, which is the test for whether the public might mistake someone else's goods for the brand's [8][9]. That is trademark law, filed through the copyright takedown mechanism, against images containing neither the logo nor a frame of the game [4]. The same notice described two federal court orders as "video/audiovisual recording" [10]. X removed the post and suspended the account regardless [1]. Whatever review happened on the platform side was checking that the fields were filled, not that the claim held together.
What the two struck parties were actually doing is unremarkable. One reporter screenshotted a public docket that never mentions the game by name [5]. One retailer reused the promotional still Rockstar publishes in its own press gallery so that outlets will run it, the same shot that has appeared on dozens of sites since May 2025 [14][15]. What an enforcement program tells itself is that every appearance of the brand during a leak window is a possible leak vector, and every notice filed is a hole plugged. Notices filed is a number a vendor can put in a monthly report, while rescinded notices is a number nobody produces unless the buyer asks for it.
What the material does not show is a rate. Two named misfires inside a seven-day window is not an error rate, because there is no published count of how many notices Ebrand sent in the same window [12][18][20]. Techdirt's read is that Take-Two and Rockstar have a history of using copyright law against leaks, cheats and mods [16]. These two cases establish the shape of the failure, not its frequency.
The test worth applying before renewing a brand-protection contract has two parts. First, sort the vendor's queue by artifact rather than by keyword, and route anything whose evidence is a court document or an asset from your own press kit to a named human with authority to kill the notice. Those are the two categories where legitimate use concentrates, and where a wrong hit is most likely to be reported by someone with a newsletter. Second, put the rescission count beside the notice count in the same report, and require that the person certifying accuracy under penalty of perjury be on your payroll rather than a subcontractor's [11]. A signature that costs the signer nothing is unlikely to buy careful accuracy.
