Tag: abuse

Transformative use of Serin Jameson's Star Trek Shitposting 6th Anniversary artwork

Copyright Troll & DMCA Abuser Serin Jameson Learns About Fair Use

Updated 2021-11-26 to change Serin’s pronouns to be ambiguous (and thus more degrading) based on a comment whining about them. Be sure to read the comment for a great example of “tolerance.”

Serin Jameson is the founder and artist for a Facebook group called “Star Trek Shitposting.” I discussed the group and its toxicity in an unedited, rambling video six weeks prior to this post. It took that long for someone in the group to notice the video. What followed was a 109,000-person Facebook group descending upon my video to attempt to make me feel bad for mocking them, with literally thousands of comments being posted, many of which proved that the loudest and most accepted people in that group are indeed horribly toxic and evil people.

Sadly for them, I don’t care what they think about me, and their insults either resulted in pity or amusement on my end.

However, Serin Jameson is the lone figure who stands above all others for taking a good old-fashioned pile of internet banter way too far, jumping straight into the realm of brazenly breaking the law.

Serin Jameson's copyright abuse
Serin Jameson’s copyright abuse

To understand the problem, one must first understand the concept of “fair use” within United States copyright law. In general, copyright law grants the rightsholders of a work the exclusive right to distribute their work for a limited period of time to encourage the ongoing creation of new works. (There are several issues with existing copyright law, including the “limited” term being insanely long, but that’s a conversation for another post.) U.S. copyright law explicitly carves out exceptions to this exclusive right, and the only one that’s important for most people is what is known as the Fair Use Doctrine. This portion of the law lays out four factors by which a fair use exception is judged. A fairly comprehensive explanation of the “four factor test” is available from the University of Texas. I won’t go over too many of the details here, but suffice it to say that my use of Serin Jameson’s artwork for the purpose of criticism and commentary combined with my heavy transformative use of the work place my use squarely within the bounds of the Fair Use Doctrine.

Transformative use of Serin Jameson's Star Trek Shitposting 6th Anniversary artwork
Transformative use of Serin Jameson’s Star Trek Shitposting 6th Anniversary artwork; from top left: original, transparency added, upper/lower layers added, completed image

Serin Jameson used (via a YouTube form) a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows rightsholders to send a DMCA takedown notice to an online service provider to notify them of posts that infringe on their copyright and have them taken down. My work constitutes plainly obvious fair use, so this action was inappropriate, and Serin Jameson knew this to be the case, and has thus stomped into Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which states (irrelevant portions excluded):

Misrepresentations.

Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section…that material or activity is infringing…shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer.

Serin Jameson is invoking U.S. law regarding material stored on U.S. company servers by a U.S. citizen, jurisdiction here is clearly and exclusively within the United States, despite Serin Jameson apparently being in Australia. United States case law requires that Serin Jameson perform a fair use analysis of the work in question prior to filing a DMCA takedown request (Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2015)). Failure to do so violates the declaration of the good faith required by the DMCA in any DMCA takedown request.

Based on the publicly available communications of Serin Jameson, my email notifying him it of his its failure to conduct a fair use analysis, and his its public confirmation of receipt of that message, Serin Jameson fits all of the requirements under the DMCA to be held legally liable for filing a false DMCA takedown against my content. I have already sent a counter-notification to YouTube.

I am posting this as both a lesson and a warning: you should not abuse the law to silence people you don’t like.

Also, for the curious: yes, United States judgments are enforceable in Australia. Serin Jameson could find itself on the receiving end of some Hauge secret sauce.

Finally, as they say on the internet, I’ve brought receipts.

Serin Jameson Facebook post 1 - planning a false DMCA takedown
Serin Jameson Facebook post 1 – planning a false DMCA takedown
My email to Serin Jameson to resolve the conflict
My email to Serin Jameson to resolve the conflict
Serin Jameson Facebook post 2 - confirming receipt of my email
Serin Jameson Facebook post 2 – confirming receipt of my email

The Financial Provider Neutrality Act (FIPNA), my legal solution to the payment processor bias problem

This is not a new problem but it’s becoming a much larger one. Many years ago, PayPal notoriously banned “adult” fiction book sellers (not actual pornography, just books with pornographic descriptions using words) from their service and it caused quite a stir. With the #PatreonPurge, PayPal’s banning of SubscribeStar, and a wide variety of individual de-platforming by other payment processors such as Stripe, we’re seeing overt actions by financial platform providers reminiscent of the days of Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklists, disrupting free exercise of speech and the ability of mutually consenting parties to engage in beneficial commerce in the age of the internet.

My solution is simple: FIPNA, the “Financial Provider Neutrality Act.” This would be a law (preferably an amendment to the United States Constitution) that forces the provider of ANY financial service platform (banks, card processors, online payment processors, investment firms, etc.) to accept and retain everyone on that platform unless they have actively used that platform to break the law or are otherwise legally barred from opening a bank account with that platform. This protection extends beyond banks to all “financial services platforms” because despite allowing you to have an account in which you may deposit and they retain funds, PayPal and others somehow are “not a bank” and are able to skirt a wide variety of consumer protection laws due to “not being a bank.”

Imagine if every bank in your town closed any bank account you opened shortly after you opened it because they didn’t like your political beliefs! That’s shockingly not far from where we’re heading with this behavior.

I am generally a pretty hard classical libertarian, but the immense control that near-monopoly corporations have over major aspects of the internet represent a colossal threat to our fundamental freedoms. What good is freedom of speech if you are banned from the public square? What good is freedom of speech if you can’t buy dinner because a required third party can block people from giving you the money that they WANT to give you? If you can’t exercise your fundamental freedoms in any effective way then you DO NOT actually have those freedoms.

Arguments about corporations having freedom of speech fall sorely flat here because this is an issue of corporate freedom of speech vs. individual freedom of speech, and the individual’s freedom of speech should always take priority. It’s debatable whether a financial platform is engaging in speech at all; they act as middlemen in transactions that skim money off the top, not as creators or publishers of speech, and if you are cut off from your income by an activist financial platform like Patreon and PayPal have been doing, your freedom of speech IS being curtailed because you can’t speak when you can’t pay for your survival.

I understand that we have hundreds of years of case law that says corporations have the same freedoms as individuals because corporations are groups of individuals exercising their freedoms and I don’t necessarily disagree with that concept. Where I draw the line is when corporate freedoms conflict with individual freedoms, and in such instances I believe that individual freedoms must take precedence and restrictions must be imposed on the corporation to preserve those individual liberties, lest society become like the worst-case example of a democracy: “three wolves and a rabbit decide what’s for dinner.”

See also: Patreon May Have Violated Anti Trust Laws In Sargon Debacle and Patreon + PayPal = Antitrust Violation (I’m done)

UPDATE: George Carlin, as always, puts it best. Here’s his diatribe on political correctness; “political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”