SCOTUS Tells Steve King To Go Away In ‘Success Kid’ Case Over Legal Fees

Ah, Steve King. Not the famed author of horror fiction, of course. I’m talking about the former representative from Iowa who authored all kinds of political horror, instead. This fucking guy was perhaps best known for wanting a fence on our southern border to be of the electrified variety, for keeping a Confederate flag on his desk despite Iowa never being in the Confederacy, and for all of the barely-veiled racism and anti-Muslim bigotry you can stomach.

He also committed copyright infringement, according to the courts. Or, rather, his campaign did when it put out a Facebook post using the “Success Kid” meme in order to raise funds, promising to keep the memes flowing so as to best trigger the libs.

Now, you will notice that the post makes what is essentially a non-transformative use of the famous “Success Kid” meme. That image is also registered for copyright by the mother of the boy in the image, Laney Griner. Griner threatened to sue and eventually did so, ultimately winning in court.

Now, we cast fairly narrow eyes at this whole thing. Griner was very public that she took action against King not primarily out of respect for copyright law, but because she rightly found King to be an abhorrent person and didn’t want her or her son to be associated with his campaign. That isn’t a great look in general for the way copyright law is supposed to work (it’s about protecting the work, not suppressing specific types of speech, even abhorrent speech) but it does help to explain some of Griner’s actions during the court proceedings. In particular, while she sued for $50k, King offered to settle for $15k. Griner refused and ultimately instead won $750 in damages. No, I’m not missing a “k” in there. This was a three-figure outcome.

But that doesn’t account for legal fees, which both sides attempted to recover. Both were rejected by the court. King appealed that ruling, with the appeal making all kinds of claims defending his use of the meme that his own legal team had already conceded in court. Then King attempted to cite Rule 68 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. That failed spectacularly as well.

Under Rule 68, if one party declines a pre-trial settlement offer and later receives a judgment smaller than that amount, the side that rejected the settlement “must pay the costs incurred after the offer was made.” King argued on appeal that attorney’s fees are part of those costs. But the Eighth Circuit held that the campaign “cannot recover attorney’s fees because it is not a prevailing party. Under the Copyright Act, only prevailing parties may be awarded a reasonable attorney’s fee.”

Not willing to take no for an answer, but apparently very willing to continue to pile up legal fees, King then petitioned SCOTUS to hear the case for those legal fees. He chiefly cited Rule 68 again, whereas Griner’s team pointed out that this whole thing had originally been decided on summary judgment. SCOTUS, unsurprisingly, declined to hear the case, sending King packing.

In comments since SCOTUS’ rejection, King demonstrates that he hasn’t changed one bit since leaving Congress.

The way in which we won the case allowed us to potentially recover our attorneys’ fees from the Plaintiffs. Our litigation team found a silver bullet for lawfare, but the trial court refused to implement Rule 68, under the opinion that it could not do so. 

This is a shame because the solution to lawfare may not be passing new laws, but rather utilizing relatively unused rules already in existence.  

In summary, the picture at issue had been used billions of times. I was targeted by Leftist copyright trolls who through the use of lawfare sought to drain me of my life savings, time and credibility. I will always wonder if the jury award would have been $1.00 if the law would have allowed it. 

He didn’t win the case, Rule 68 doesn’t apply because copyright law says so, and if he had just let the summary judgment stand, this case would have been far less expensive for him than it ended up being.

In other words, the only one that appears to want to drain Kings’ life saving is King. Somehow I don’t think he’s quite reached the need for those foodstamps he wanted to defund just yet.