A Disney affiliate recently filed DMCA applications to force the issue.
At the start of the year, someone on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit, a community dedicated to upcoming Marvel productions, posted the mother of all MCU leaks. A month before the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a user named MSSmods shared a 63-page Google Doc transcript of the film’s dialogue. Now, Disney wants to know who was behind the leak and is trying to force Reddit and Google to identify the person or group of people responsible.
As first reported by TorrentFreak, Disney’s MVL Film Finance unit, a subsidiary the company established to support Marvel Studios productions, has filed two Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena applications designed to compel Reddit and Google to identify who was behind the leak. As MSSmods is an account shared among the moderators of r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers, Reddit complying with the application would entail the company identifying more than one person. What’s more, Disney has requested that Google and Reddit share any “identifying information” they have on MSSmods — including names, telephone numbers and IP addresses — along with details on any user who may have been involved in posting, editing or uploading the leak.
Reddit did not say if it intends to comply with the application. “Reddit is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We have rigorous processes in place to assess legal requests and object when appropriate,” a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget and pointed to the company’s legal request guidelines. Google did not immediately respond to a comment request.
It’s not clear what, if anything, Disney plans to do about the source of the leak, possibly a subtitle vendor or freelance translator. The document MSSmods shared was a translation of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s Portuguese subtitles, with some of the dialogue not presented in chronological order.