Twitter Is Not Real Life: Copyright Lawsuit Edition
Sargon of Akkad was targeted by a DMCA takedown notice. This backfired badly, and the leftist activist who initiated this lawsuit is now on the hook for $38k in attorney's fees.
I'll quote from the court opinion:
Defendant Carl Benjamin, also known as "Sargon of Akkad," brings this motion for attorneys' fees pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 505 following the Court's dismissal of the copyright infringement action brought by Plaintiff Akilah Hughes against Benjamin and ten "John Doe" defendants. For the reasons set forth below, the Court grants Benjamin's motion and concludes that he is entitled to $38,911.89 in attorneys' fees and costs….
On November 18, 2016, Hughes, an internet commentator and filmmaker, posted a nine-minute-and-fifty-second video titled We Thought She Would Win to her YouTube channel. We Thought She Would Win consisted of footage of Hughes at Hillary Clinton's campaign party at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan on November 8, 2016, the night of the 2016 presidential election.[...]The next day, Hughes discovered that Benjamin, a fellow YouTuber but with a decidedly conservative/libertarian bent, had posted a video titled SJW Levels of Awareness to one of his YouTube channels. Benjamin's video consisted entirely of six clips from We Thought She Would Win, totaling one minute and fifty-eight seconds, spliced together. Hughes responded by submitting a "takedown notice" to YouTube pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), which led to YouTube disabling public access to Benjamin's video.[...] Thereafter, YouTube reinstated public access to Benjamin's video.
On August 25, 2017, [sued, alleging] … that Benjamin infringed on her copyright of We Thought She Would Win through his public posting on YouTube and Twitter of SJW Levels of Awareness. Throughout the course of this litigation, Hughes prominently referenced Benjamin and the ongoing suit on Twitter. For instance, on December 8, 2016, Hughes tweeted that she had "a [C]hristmas present on the way" for Benjamin, referring to the lawsuit. On October 28, 2018, Hughes tweeted that she was "currently suing [Benjamin's] white supremacist ass for stealing [her] content." Two months later, Hughes referred to Benjamin in a tweet as a "carnival barker" and expressed a desire to convince the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to terminate Benjamin's campaign to fund his legal costs for this action and to "bankrupt" Benjamin with a libel suit. And on February 12, 2019, Hughes replied to a tweet predicting that she would lose her copyright lawsuit by declaring that she was "gonna take hundreds of thousands of dollars USD" from Benjamin.
On February 3, 2020, the Court concluded that SJW Levels of Awareness plainly fell within the fair use exception to the Copyright Act and dismissed Hughes's complaint.
Benjamin argues that Hughes brought this suit to silence her political opponents and critics and to generate publicity for herself…. Here, the Court has little difficulty concluding that Hughes's dual goals in bringing her baseless suit were to inflict financial harm on Benjamin and to raise her own profile in the process.
Improper or bad faith motivations are generally difficult to discern, as litigants often have a variety of objectives and may obscure their baser ones behind a veil of legitimate-sounding claims. In this case, however, Hughes openly discussed her improper motivations on both Twitter and her website. Indeed, Hughes admitted to potentially hundreds of thousands of followers that she intended to (i) "bankrupt" Benjamin (Doc. No. 43 at 2), (ii) stymy his attempts to crowdfund his legal costs, and (iii) use copyright laws to silence her political opponents and critics. Other posts, including her public boasting about the legal dispute on her social media accounts (even describing her complaint as a "[C]hristmas present" for Benjamin) and her public belittlement and celebrity-style feuding with Benjamin, strongly suggest that Hughes intended to sensationalize the litigation to elevate her own public profile and achieve a secondary financial gain. Together, then, Hughes's public comments reveal an intent to abuse the legal system in order to further a personal agenda that had little to do with the Copyright Act….
Sargon of Akkad had raised $120k via the GoFundMe he organized. Similarly, I imagine Hughes would be able to cover her gigantic court ordered bill via crowd-funding as well. She is claiming that she lost the case because her first lawyer inadvertently made the case about harassment instead of copyright infringement, not Hughes. But of course, in the same Twitter thread, her motivations still leak through like for example when she posts screenshots of herself chiding Sargon for using her clips to promote "hate speech".
I thought this was interesting because it's an internet activist trying to transpose the same tools and tactics you'd use to whip up a cancel mob online but through the legal system and it ends up failing really badly.
While it’s true that filing frivolous DMCA notices rarely results in material consequences, the difference here is that Hughes not only filed a DMCA notice, but she filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. YouTube reinstated the video shortly after the DMCA notice, so that was not at issue. Hughes was not satisfied with trying and failing to use DMCA in her favor, so she went ahead with a federal lawsuit. Corporations do not engage in the latter frivolously, and neither should Hughes have.
On similar grounds, here is the story of Richard Liebowitz, who is probably the most hated copyright lawyer in the country. I really enjoyed reading the saga of his grandmother's funeral.