He Might Be Sued

Charlie is getting sued.

Title's not clickbait. For the first time ever, I have been served some hefty legal paperwork.

Wow.

And it's not, there wasn't anything ceremonious about it. It's not like any of the, you know, crazy stories you might have heard about people being served where like someone will, you'd go incognito like a secret agent, like with the disguise where they have some kind of silicone mask of your mother's face on it so you open the door and then bang, you get the paperwork served to you or anything. It was nothing like that. Too bad. Boring.

Just a normal, unassuming, albeit very large, envelope in the mail. Now it's not a full-blown lawsuit or anything at the moment, it is some demands because there are two YouTubers that believe I have stepped up-

Oh, fuck! Are you kidding me?

Aw, Jugger, alright, alright, let's hear it. ...on their tootsies and infringed on their copyright. They are Reed Timmer and Brad Arnold. Now, I initially reached out to both of them because the language in this paperwork is very fishy. I'll get into that more in a moment but I wanted to talk directly with them to see if this is like a scam or something. I wanted to make sure this was like a

legitimate thing before I got my lawyers on this. They haven't responded so I'm guessing this is probably legitimate like this is probably something they are actually trying to go through with. Though I do know that there are a lot of law firms now that are trying to Encroach in the space to convince youtubers to go through copyright law to try and make money Yeah, that is something that a bunch of firms have reached out to Matt about to do on my behalf Which is unhinged why any firm would think I would ever do something like that

But it is somewhat normal in the space right now So it is I think there is a chance that maybe that's what's happening here And they don't know that but since they didn't respond I can't say for sure so as of now it Feels legitimate so I will be getting my lawyers on this obviously to be going through the next steps of this now Most likely very long procedure, but let's go ahead and talk about why are you getting sued. What the claim is. Yeah what is this? So last year during Hurricane Milton I did a stream

in the middle of Hurricane Milton. I'm in Tampa and Hurricane Milton came through to spread our cheeks. I was streaming during it. While streaming I would check like weather updates or like some streams to see the progress of Milton and what's going on in the areas. Now I think all of you know this I don't do react content anymore. So if there's ever any like Content or footage on my stream. It's very brief. And the only things I usually watch are game trailers, movie trailers or News footage like news broadcast publicly available news

so for the hurricane, I thought it would be A-OK to show very brief clips of what was happening with Milton so I could stay up to date, as well as I guess share with the audience who was asking, like, what's going on, are you safe, what's happening? And one of the streams I pulled up was a Ryan Hullal stream where he was showing a bunch of footage of Hurricane Milton. And one of the footage snippets, like one of the contributors was Brad Arnold. You can see his footage there as one of the, you know, on the scene, boots on the ground,

you know, reporters there. And I had that section there, that footage that included Brad Arnold's work there on my stream for less than 30 seconds. Unless I missed another instance of it somewhere it was present for less than 30 seconds. Though I did pause at one point so if you count the pausing with the image of the footage there it's a little longer. I can't imagine a still image counts. If it does then no bussy is safe.

So it's like a copyright thing.

That would just be fully Pandora's Box wide open here. Even this video would be in jeopardy then because I did just show you a screenshot of that stream that had a still image from Brad Arnold's on the scene work. But it's just a picture, it's not moving or anything and it's like, I have it here for five seconds

I guess we'll see. I think that would be really scary if that is now completely prohibitive and a

Potential copy it is a potential copyright violation Like any time that you're using somebody else's content. There is a technical copyright violation And you prove fair use in a court of law. So what happens is that you use somebody else's content, they say don't use the content, or you know, they file a lawsuit against you, and then you have to go to court to decide whether it is, you know, like whether it's fair use or not. So really the courts decide whether something is fair use.

It's not like there is like a definitive thing that is like just kind of proactively there. Right infringement. That would be very, very scary. Anyway though, that's the extent of Brad Arnold's footage that entered into the thunder dome

of my hour and a half long hurricane Milton stream. So it was less than 30 seconds. I don't think that's an extensive period of time there, but I'll go ahead and let bygones be bygones on that and move on to Reed Timmer. Reed Timmer and Brad Arnold are both being represented by this firm, so it's a tag team here, a dynamic duo looking to double fist my butthole. Reed

Timmer was on my stream for I wrote these down because it was a couple times 28 seconds the first time where I showed some of Reed Timmer's once again on the scene footage. It was 28 seconds to see what was going on and then once I showed that, Reed Timmers fans came in my chat telling me that I should really check out his tank. He built like this really cool tank and they really wanted me to see Reed Timmers tank. Yeah, no doubt. So I went to his video that showed his tank and I had that on screen in total for

one minute and ten seconds. Yes. I then skipped towards like more of the middle of the video to see the rockets because everyone wanted me to see like the rockets he has on the tank. So I went there and that was on screen for 25 seconds total. Yeah. And then I just paused it and I just had it as a still image there. So it was there for a bit longer as a still image, not the video playing or anything like that. So in total less than two minutes was Reed Timmer's footage

across two pieces of his content, one being a live stream and then the other being the tank that his fans really came in and wanted me to see. Maybe that was an elaborate ruse, a big bait from the Reed Timmer community. I think this has definitely been like with a lot of like I've always said that on YouTube, YouTube doesn't have 10 commandments, it has one commandment, and thou shalt not file copyright strikes. In general, I think that this has been the way that a lot of people on YouTube see things is

that if you don't want people reacting to your content or doing something like that, it's completely justified and totally okay. But I think that just telling them and then asking them to delete it or sending a takedown request because there's multiple different ways that you can handle this right? Like you can use, you can just simply send a takedown request, you can try

to contact the individual, or you could do anything else, right? It limits growth. Yeah, exactly. It's gonna take their careers, maybe. And so you don't have to file a lawsuit, you could just simply tell the person, hey, take this down, or don't watch my content, etc. And there have been people in in the past with me, for example, I mean, obviously, I do react content. And they've said, like, hey, could you wait a while to react to the video? Or Hey, could you, you know, not watch my videos, because I don't like

it for whatever reason. And I always respect their wishes. It It doesn't really matter what the reason is or what the purpose for it is that it is. I always do it. And the reason why I do it is because I think that that's what they want and it's their content and the only time that I don't follow that is if the content is fundamentally about me, right? So somebody makes a video that's critical of me or negative about me and they're like,

well, don't watch this video. Well, too fucking bad, right? I'm going to watch it anyway. But otherwise, I'm always going to do that. And so that's something that we've dealt with, you know, on my perspective, multiple, multiple times, right? If somebody asks us like, Hey, you know, could you take this down or not post this this early, we have it all the time. But I think that really, whenever you're talking about like filing lawsuits and getting into legal disputes, I think that people are getting in a little bit over their head in a way that they might not necessarily understand. And I'm not necessarily talking about Reed or the other guy that's involved with this

either, but I think in a general sense, if whenever you really get down to actual broadcasting rights and the letter of the law, there are a lot of things that you're not necessarily able to do legally that people on YouTube do all the time. And it's just kind of ignored. And if you know anything about copyright law or any sort of like broadcast recommendations, that's always the case. Yeah, Bloomberg on gamers Nexus. Exactly. Yeah. And so retweeted something out, I'll watch it. And because mutual growth and

consideration and promotion, well, that's that's their decision that they can make, right? I think if you post something on the internet, you should expect to have people look at it and talk about it. And we try to do the best that we can, et cetera. And that's all you really can do. But the difference, I think, with this

is that you don't really go through any of those just reasonable remedies of just talking to somebody, asking them to take it down, or even asking them like, hey, could I at least get a cut of the money that you made using my content?

Like there's a lot of ways that you can approach this without filing a lawsuit. And whenever you are filing a lawsuit, like you have to keep in mind that there's a huge amount of time, energy, and money that goes into doing it.

And even if you win the lawsuit, you're probably not going to come out ahead in a lot of cases because you're usually not going to settle for millions of dollars. And you have wasted so many hours of your life on this that really you would have been better off just making more content yourself. So that's my advice. That's my opinion.

And I think that just on YouTube in general, nobody likes seeing this happen. Because fundamentally, I think that people have a ideal of a free internet, right? They don't want to have, you know, the law be applied to every single different little tiny thing on the internet. I think that's why this is different, but it's also not completely different than why people push back so hard against like internet ID, because they don't want to have the internet

turn into real life in the same way. Don't you need to reach out to them before suing them? I have no idea. I don't think that you have to but yeah. Unity to get me in hot water with him. You don't necessarily have to. This was a galaxy brain chess maneuver. Impressive work. I hadn't seen that line before. The fucking the scotch

open got me good there

It worked the bait was success somebody asked can you be sued for watching a video that includes the material that Charlie is getting sued for?

That's the reason why this is Pandora's box

That's the exact reason why you do not want to go to court because all of those questions are really really complicated massive Omega Pandora's box slippery slope yeah full does now read Timur is here in the squared circle with a copyright notice

and now let's talk about the actual paperwork here as I said the language in the squared circle with a copyright notice.

And now let's talk about the actual paperwork here. As I said, the language feels very fishy to me. And the lawyer that I had glance over it to take a peek also found it to be really, really weird. One of the first things that jumped out was they claim that I've used it in multiple instances,

in multiple locations. They say that I unlicensed, distributed their work in the following locations, and then it gives two links to a YouTube video. I said a YouTube video because they only have one YouTube video there.

They list it twice. They do the same link twice, but then imply that I've done it multiple times in multiple locations. So that's already weird. It's the Hurricane Milton stream. I am not familiar with Brad Arnold's work nor Reed Timmer's. That was the only time I'd ever even heard of their names was during the Hurricane Milton stream I did from, well, Reed Timmer's

community and then also just from trying to stay knowledgeable on what the fuck is happening with the natural disaster that's hitting my home like that's the only time I was ever ever even heard of their names before and What I put on stream of theirs was there for such a small amount of time I thought there'd be no issue there at all. I don't think that there would be I think if this goes to court He's gonna win this for sure like you're showing a news broadcast for 30 seconds

Like I mean, it's not going to go anywhere. Like, everybody knows that. It paperwork goes on to, I don't know if I'm allowed to say the exact amount, but it goes on to say that they a lot, I'm sure potentially entitled to many tens of thousands of dollars per infraction. Wow. It to many tens of thousands of dollars per infraction.

Wow.

It makes a mention of damages that could get up to six figures.

Oh?

About me potentially posting their content on all of my other socials and my other websites. Which is obviously not anything that happened. It was only during that stream for like sub two minutes.

Yeah.

At least from what I can tell on the stream. Maybe I missed a couple instances, but it's not a long period of time. So they just made up bullshit in the legal filing. They just said things that weren't true.

Okay.

At all. But it's saying, or rather implying, that I may have been blasting it all over the place, thus they would be entitled to more money. And then it says things like, in order to comply, I would need to explain where and how I obtained their client's work to copy it.

As if I had some kind of, oh, who knows?

Nobody knows! Where could it come from?

Ocean's Eleven style heist where I broke into Fort Knox to steal their copyrighted

footage for myself.

Like I took a fucking Dragon Ball or yeah Which is really weird because what do you mean? How did I find this those were two? Absolutely massive streams during Hurricane Milton that were there to try and keep people informed on what was happening with Hurricane It was like fucking a hundred thousand viewers and like they were huge huge So I saw those streams and I tuned in to see what was happening with Hurricane Milton

for my own safety and to stay up to date on the progress of the hurricane. And the second part of that is absolutely mind-boggling about like where and how I found it and copied it. I didn't fucking copy it, I looked at it. I had my peepers on it very briefly. I didn't steal their work, I like you know fucking download it to a floppy disk, you know didn't steal their work. I like, you know, fucking download it to a floppy disk. You know, don't copy that floppy type shit. Like I didn't, I didn't copy anything. It's not their work though. It's a new, isn't it a newscast? Do they copy

it from a news org? I don't know. Uh, and like all, source footage and what they have rights to etc I have no idea but what I do know is that doing this especially with like the concentric circles of ownership is opening Pandora's box in a massive way I looked at their stream for a very very very very very problem at a period of time during a hurricane that was hitting my house just to see what was going on and stay knowledgeable. Also to show, chat, stream what was going on in the area. I'm not exactly equipped to show it myself by just taking this camera and going outside

during it. I'd get blown away. I'm fucking 5'6". That shit would ragdoll me. I don't have all the gadgetry and doodads to show it. So I looked for... I don't think being tall helps. Like, I'm 6'3", and I feel like I get blown away too, because I'm skinny, right? I mean, it's like, you ever see like a piece of grass? Just,

it's gone. That'd be me. Very small handful of seconds at the on-the-scene storm chasers and reporters just to stay up to date. I didn't copy their work and I wasn't trying to steal their work and pretend like it was mine or make money off of their work. It is an hour and a half stream during Hurricane Milton and their footage is present for less than two minutes at the end of the stream, by the way. Like, Reid Timmer's section there is literally right before I went offline, before my power got

knocked out briefly.

I remember watching that.

I can't even remember if my power got knocked out in that stream. It happened a couple times. It was on Twitch, I thought.

I'm pretty sure it got knocked out in that one. I don't even remember now. But like, it's at the end of the stream. I feel like it is very odd if this is something Reed Timmer and Brad Arnold are legitimately pursuing. Or maybe this is all a huge misunderstanding and they don't even know that I got served these papers. I'm hoping that's the case. I have no ill will towards Brad Arnold or Reed Timmer one way or the other I suppose. If they really feel like I have done something

wrong with that, then they're fully within their right to serve me these these precious little papers here that I'm patent real nicely that it is what it is I wanted to keep you all in the loop here because this I'm not gonna lie was extremely annoying if you follow moist critical gaming that's probably will have seen the league video I post the

other day where I was fuming well it's because I got papers and I was yeah so

he's just mauling out cuz you just got fucking sued. Yeah, I get that. ...fucking two lawyers about it. So it was an extremely frustrating day. Anyway, I wanted to just keep you all in the loop here on what's going on.

Uh, that's really about it. See ya.

Well, that's certainly fucking weird. I'll say that for sure. like I think this is a very problematic weird thing to do. Obviously, and apparently and before I go any farther, I do want to say that apparently Reed Timmer, let me see if I can find this. Reed Timmer. Is this is this the guy right here? I'm not sure if this is the guy or not. Yeah, yeah, this has got to be the guy.

As part of a campaign against content theft on social media, it has come to my attention that a popular streamer named Charlie or more critical was included in the latest wave of stolen content from our hurricane streams last year. I don't know if Charlie I don't know Charlie or even that this happened. It sounds like he broke up progress 30 seconds of our live stream for the purpose of letting people know that it will what was happening.

I'm fine with this instance of rebroadcast by Charlie Penguin, and will remove myself from any content lawsuit against Charlie next time just ask for permission and I can clear it. We do have to push back against content that in general and social media space much of us what happens from traditional media, since it makes it impossible to cover our science budget and expenses with the unoriginal content flags that result from stolen content that is rebroadcast. And you have to understand that, you know, this component right here is really important in understanding what this problem is, is that on YouTube, you can this is the reason why I made an official channel. It's because before that I just let

all my different guys that you know, uploaded my videos, I let them just post whatever the hell they wanted. But the problem is that when you have other people that are reposting your stuff verbatim, what ends up happening is that you get hit with a duplicate content ID. And then your video gets taken down, even if you were the one that had the video. So what he's saying is that there's traditional media that's re uploading his content with effectively no cover it or sorry, no, no react to it. There's no innovation. There's no transformation to this content. They're just re uploading it. And because they're

re uploading it in such a raw state, it's actually being caught by the the algorithm that the text duplicate content and then it's now what do you call it? It's now being like, sorry, I'm like, I drew a blank. I was thinking about something else. Now it's being demonetized. Excuse me.

Yeah, now now it gets demonetized. Like and that it happens at the beginning. And so that's never the video makes the most view the most money and gets the most views. I would just like to have a stay in my basement and stream rate our breakdown if we all let media steal and rebroadcast our content for profit. Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, you can't have people that are directly rebroadcasting it. I mean, I think nobody supports that really, except for like a handful of people. I'm like long break even person financially or maybe a little lost. This is not from a position

of greed. Every sentence I make goes back into storm chasing science, dumb denominators and disaster relief. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Okay, so then this is a comment. Okay, real talk. We pretend you don't know who he is and how much content was used. So you don't know who's being sued. How many other things are you going to be are going to be sued for the same thing or even less? Sure, you're breaking even these lawsuits can send others into the hole that they can't get out of and they didn't do anything wrong. Even if they win, they could be ruined. Have you thought this through? Many of them are media companies or channel names. I don't know Charlie. I think that's also what's happening too.

So you're actively massuing everyone and everything. Your goal is to break even. I hope Charlie doesn't let this sit and counter sues you. I don't know if this is really worth anybody. As I said, getting involved with copyright disputes on the internet on YouTube is a huge fucking mistake because like for example let me give you just a very very just

like basic example if I play a video game the developer can tell me that I can't play that video game and DMCA me playing that game they can and so they can they can shut it down it's a losing battle yeah well what what I'm saying is that everybody will lose if they make if you have more copyright laws and lawsuits that happen, everybody will lose Nintendo. Nintendo did do that. They did that for a long time. And if you weren't part of the Nintendo creator program, you weren't able

to upload content onto YouTube. So seeing this happen again, I think it's really quite obvious if you don't know if you're a plaintiff in a lawsuit, then maybe you are a plaintiff in too many lawsuits just a thought to ponder. I do but they often do it under company names. 30 seconds of weather reaction is content theft. Have you ever heard of fair use? Well, that's that's why he's taking him out of the lawsuit.. This isn't a crossover I expected. And some of y'all need to get you need to

have permission to use the video like it's his. This is etiquette, but I'm a boomer. I think that if you're posting your content online, you should expect to have people react to it. I think that you're giving people permission by posting it in a public space. That's my opinion. Obviously, that's not the legal opinion. That's not legally accurate. But that's my, that's, that's my viewpoint on it, is that if you if you're posting this in a public space, then you should expect to have other people react to it. I think

that's very obvious that, you know, reacting to something, and then completely just using it as a market replacement for that thing, and then not train changing it, transforming it, reacting to it at all, just re-uploading it is obviously a bad thing, but other than that I don't really see it as being too big of an issue, right? And so legal doesn't always mean right? Yeah, yeah, of course, right?

And so that's really it, but it seems like this lawsuit was a bit of a misunderstanding. Now people that don't trust somebody like Reid are going to say that the reason why he's saying it was a misunderstanding is because now he's getting negative publicity for it. So I don't think him saying this will necessarily really help him. I think people will still just assume that he's lying and you know he's an asshole, but in a general sense I do kind of uh, I do think things like this happen sometimes. And I think that the problem that they're bringing up is a legitimate problem. Uh, don't mean this in a bad way, but have you ever served anyone for stealing their content? Have I ever served anyone?

I don't really engage with or do anything legal at all. I don't think that's really a good idea. I think it's very risky to do, and I would not do it at all. I mean, like maybe... I can't say never. I can't say never, but I can say that I've never had to and I would never want to.

So yeah, it's just that simple.

And uh, Reed's a good man. Sad people will think about him like this. Well, I mean, you have to be, I mean, to be fair, it is a fair criticism that you have people, uh, that are going around filing lawsuits and they don't even know who the people that they're filing the lawsuits against are. Like, I mean, that's a fair criticism. Like, I'm not hating on Reed either, but like, yeah, that's a problem. Like, if you don't even know who you're suing and you're like, oh, I accidentally sued this person that I didn't mean

to, that's a pretty big fuck-up, isn't it? So, yeah, I mean, and it doesn't mean he's a horrible person or he's such a bad guy or anything like that but at the same time it's a fuck up it's an absolute fuck up so yeah it's that simple but not just lawsuits but frivolous lawsuits yeah Ethan's a great example of that tons of people react to the content note but only three did it maliciously and that's why he's suing them yeah I think that you have to really talk about people that are maliciously doing it and maliciously uploading versus people that are just reacting and talking about a topic right that's really all there is to it so yeah uh business runner is usually the ones doing the deed well i i mean he was the one named in the lawsuit right he's claiming that 20 billion views were

stolen but you never even hosted that many views moist had not watched your stream well 20 billion i i don't know where he's getting that number i have no idea but anyway i'll be right back and i i don't know where he's getting that number i have no idea but anyway i'll be right back and then we'll look at this okay and ten