YouTuber Ethan Klein has been through his fair share of controversy in recent years, and he’s hopping right back into it by suing a few creators for the way they reacted to his “Content Nuke” video on Hasan Piker.
His suit isn’t related to the contents of his video and the complaints he had about Hasan’s ideologies or beliefs, but rather because he believes the way in which Denims, Kaceytron, and Frogan reacted to his video was a willful violation of fair use.
Ethan cited the fact that these creators claimed watching the video on their stream was the “ethical” way to view it by not supporting h3h3productions by giving him ad revenue.
Klein says this belief flies in the face of fair use law and is suing these three creators on that basis, claiming that continued activity like this could ultimately blow up in the face of livestreaming platforms like Twitch if fair use isn’t better enforced.
Ethan Klein sues creators claiming fair use violations
“The state of reaction content on Twitch is so broken these creators feel comfortable looking right into a camera and saying outright, ‘Hey, I’m stealing this guy’s content. Pay me instead of him.’ This is not a healthy environment,” Klein claimed in his video.
“With people like Hasan reacting to entire TV shows on stream, my fear is that Sony or Disney comes along, sues everybody, and sets a devastating precedent that could endanger our entire field.”
So, he’s filed lawsuits against all three creators with similar complaints across all of the documents he’s released so far. At the moment, only the suits for Denims and Frogan have been filed, with Kaceytron’s “coming soon”, but even these two suits alone total over 144 pages – and that doesn’t even include the several specific examples Klein listed.
He claims the commentary of both Denims and Frogan contains little to no transformative qualities that would make it protected by fair use, with both creators having points in their reaction where they got up from their chair and physically left the room to let his video entertain their stream.
“The poverty of Denims’ commentary – coupled with her highly commercial use of the Works that she specifically intended to serve as substitute for the originals – fails to justify copying TEI’s Works in their entirety (or nearly in their entirety). Rather, Denims’ “group viewing session” is a quintessential example of copyright infringement – i.e., the unauthorized exploitation of TEI’s Works “to get attention [and] avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh,” an excerpt from Klein’s suit against Denims reads. Similar complaints were levied against Frogan as well in her suit.
He also cited that both creators had significantly higher viewership than normal, with Denims shooting from around 3k average viewers to 45k during the reaction, and is using that to claim they’re exploiting his content for their own gain.
Klein is pursuing $150,000 in damages from both creators, with the amount tied to Kaceytron’s suit still up in the air.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.