Marvel So Angry About Leaked ‘Ant-Man’ Dialogue That It Seeks To Unmask Google, Reddit Users
It won’t surprise any regular read here when I say that Marvel is notoriously aggressive on matters of intellectual property. Equally unsurprising will be my reminding our dear readers that this includes the company attempting to use IP laws in the past to un-ring the leak-bell when content has been leaked early. Hell, Marvel gets so frothy over this sort of thing that on no less than two separate occasions the company has DMCA’d to hell trailers for its own movies. Trailers that are advertisements and that it should want to be spread as far and wide as possible.
The company hates leaks, is the point, and so it’s not surprising that it wasn’t happy when dialogue for the forthcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania showed up in a Google doc, which was being discussed on Reddit. But now Marvel is asking Reddit and Google to unmask several individuals on those platforms as a result.
Marvel on Friday asked a federal court to issue Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas to both Reddit and Google demanding the identities of people allegedly involved in the pre-release dialogue reveal, including Reddit moderators whom Marvel suspects of being behind the leak. The requests were filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The Google document was deleted after Marvel owner Disney filed a copyright complaint to Google. The link to the Google document was also deleted from the Reddit thread. But Marvel still wants to find out who posted the Google Doc and who shared it to Reddit.
Okay, where to begin? Let’s start with the fact that, as Reddit pointed out in the Ars post, there was no infringing content hosted on Reddit as part of any of this. Instead, there was a Reddit thread with a discussion about the leaked dialogue and a link back to the Google doc that actually contained the leak. That’s it. And I frankly can’t imagine a single reason why any Reddit user should have their right to anonymous speech be infringed upon simply because Marvel doesn’t like what they were talking about. That really should be the end of it as far as Reddit is concerned.
As for Google, it’s worth noting that the company removed the linked content the same day the Reddit thread began, at Marvel’s request. It was handled quickly, in other words. It’s difficult to claim that the brevity with which the linked content was available makes it likely that the leak was fairly buttoned up, but I haven’t been able to find it by doing some quick Google searching.
But the larger point is that there ought to be a very high bar for unmasking anonymous speech. While culture and content is not without its importance, I’m having a hard time formulating an argument justifying the unmasking of a Google user over leaked dialogue of a superhero movie that was accessible for a period of time that is best measured in hours.
I get you’re pissed Marvel, but perhaps we’re going just a tad overboard, no?