While most of us never see a TV show until it airs, there are all manner of people out there — from network people to entertainment reporters to advertisers — who often get to see episodes ahead of time, and some of these folks (or maybe their idiot kids or roommates) are then sharing these videos online with spoiler-hungry fan communities. For the producers of hit AMC show The Walking Dead, it’s not enough to just take these spoiler videos down as they pop up, they want to know where the clips are coming from.

We’re not talking about entire episodes that are being shared illegally via BitTorrent. This is about short clips of shows that just haven’t aired yet.

TorrentFreak reports that online forums like TheSpoilingDeadFans.com have been a resource for early teasers of upcoming episodes.

And even though these clips only help to feed fan frenzy — it’s not like people who go through the hassle of actively hunting down spoilers aren’t then going to watch the show — AMC, which also produces the show, has been making copyright claims to force video-sharing sites like Vimeo to remove the offending images.

But they are also going a step further and having the court subpoena [PDF] Vimeo to provide any identifying information the site might have on the user who uploaded such clips.

For that user’s sake, we hope they used a throwaway e-mail account and spoofed IP address. If not, they could be facing hefty fines for merely trying to do what Chris Hardwick does every week when he shows advance clips of the show on Talking Dead.

At the very least, if AMC is able to track down the source of the clips, you can be sure that person will be blacklisted from ever getting another advanced look at one of the network’s shows; even if it was their stupid kid/roommate who did the spoiling.

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