Disney’s Marvel Studios is trying to force Reddit and Google to unmask whoever leaked dialogue for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” a month before it was released, according to court documents.
A request filed in California’s Northern District Court on Friday by Marvel asked the court to grant subpoenas for “all identifying information” for a Reddit user who posted “then-unreleased dialogue” from the film on the r/MarvelStudioSpoilers subreddit.
A similar request was made from Marvel to Google, where the information was hosted in a Google Doc. The film was released on Feb. 17 and the dialogue was leaked on Jan. 15, according to the documents.
According to the Court's website, the subpoenas were issued on Monday.
The requests come after Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests were filed from Marvel to both Google and Reddit in January. Reddit declined to approve the request.
Google responded to the Jan. 21 DMCA request two days later and said that the Google Doc where the alleged dialogue was hosted was already gone, leaving the company with nothing to do.
According to the court documents, Marvel is requesting “information provided when an Infringing User established their Reddit account” like their name, address, telephone number, email address, as well as any "IP address(es) used by such user” and for “any other user(s) responsible for posting, editing, and/or maintaining the content.”
Since the news of the subpoena request dropped, r/MarvelStudioSpoilers went into "private community" mode. People who weren't already members can no longer view its content.
It’s unclear whether Reddit will comply with the movie franchise behemoth's demand for the names and contact information of the people who linked to the script.
Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.
According to TorrentFreak, who previously reported on the leaks, dialogue from the film was displayed on a Portuguese web interface and then translated and posted to Google.
An alleged archived web page of the forum showed a user named "Vision" post what they claimed were subtitles for the movie, which revealed the film's dialogue. The user warned that because they'd been put through several translations, the dialogue may not be entirely accurate.
"The file was provided to us in another language," the user wrote, "and we used three different translators to convert it to English. The file comes with the movie's subtitles not in chronological order. Thus we have arranged the first half as best that we could, and left breaks between sections in the second half dividing the various scenes up where we believe they are."
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” was one of the worst-reviewed Marvel movies to date and grossed $198 million domestically through its fourth weekend, outpacing the original “Ant-Man” but trailing behind “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”
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