Join The Fan Fiction Deep State And Watch This Latest Video That Addison Cain Really Doesn't Want You To See

Last month we had a post about wolf kink erotica writer Addison Cain (pen name) and her abuse of the DMCA which we had first written about in May, but which came up again after YouTuber Lindsay Ellis did a fantastic video analyzing the entire case. If you haven't seen that, here it is:

The reason we wrote about it again last month was that after Ellis posted her video, a lawyer named Tynia Watson had sent Ellis what appeared to be one of the stupidest legal threat letters I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). Ellis only revealed a brief portion of that letter, but that was enough.

Now, in a new video, Ellis describes all of the nonsense that has happened since then, which goes super deep in the weeds on a variety of things. You can watch the whole thing here:

I'm not going to go over everything in the video because (1) you should watch it and (2) a bunch of it is super crazy and I don't even want to start to think about figuring out how to explain all of the background necessary. Instead, I'm just going to focus on the legal threats of Tynia Watson, who is, somehow, an actual lawyer, meaning she should fucking know better than to send such bullshit conspiracy-theory laden emails to basically everyone.

As we noted, the original letter from Watson seemed to be claiming both copyright infringement (on the basis that Ellis quoted a few short segments in an obviously fair use manner) and "numerous false statements" that I could see no evidence of. In fact, Ellis' reporting got me to go back and read through a whole bunch of documents in one of the lawsuits that the video was about, and discover how Cain had insisted, repeatedly, that it was her publisher who filed the lawsuits and she had nothing to do with it -- though in discovery in a different lawsuit, it came out that Cain was in the driver's seat through much of this, telling her publisher to send the (bogus) DMCA notices, and then later telling her publisher how she was going to "hide behind" them. In fact, Cain got dismissed from one of the lawsuits on the basis that the DMCA notices were all sent by the publisher. That's kind of a big deal.

Anyway, Watson then started sending more threat letters, including to Patreon and YouTube, to try to get the video taken down. Any real copyright (or defamation) lawyer should be embarrassed that Watson is also a lawyer, because these letters are... bad. You can see them in the video (so I don't have full copies to post here, as I normally would). First, Watson sent a takedown to... Patreon. Even though the video was hosted at YouTube. Ellis, like many YouTubers and podcasters, uses Patreon as a revenue source, but there's little reason to target them for copyright infringement other than being vindictive. Patreon told Ellis to go through the standard counternotice process, but did ask her to remove the link to YouTube from her Patreon post for the requisite 10 days under the DMCA to retain its safe harbors (and then relink the video). But then it also told Ellis that if this did go to court, it would totally back her up (FWIW, Patreon has some great people who work on this stuff, so I'm not surprised to see them stand behind their user like that).

Then, YouTube notified her that it had also received a takedown from Cain. YouTube went even further and said that it didn't see how the video was infringing at all, and had rejected the takedown demand. Ellis seems surprised about this and says that she's never heard of YouTube not complying with a takedown, but it actually happens reasonably often. Despite all the mess with things like ContentID, YouTube's legal team does take fair use seriously, and especially on high profile videos is pretty quick to push back on censorial thuggish bullshit takedowns.

Ellis then has a fun narration of the takedown letter that Cain sent to YouTube, which the company passed on. It's... stunningly stupid. Here's a key clip that I want to post here just to make sure that everyone can see just how incredibly stupid it is:

The work infringed is not "fair use". My book is not public domain; it is a creative work, not a text book. The poster reads my books to degrade my work. This is not fair use of a copyrighted work, nor was this video a review of my work. It was a personal attack framed around two