Corporate Counsel Daily, Popular YouTubers take on Twitch broadcasters and Reddit moderators, (Jun 25, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The lawsuits intertwine the worlds of copyright fair use principles, Middle East politics, and the activities of so-called “snark subreddits.”

Three prominent broadcasters on the social media platform Twitch arranged so-called “group viewing sessions” of copyrighted YouTube videos in which they showed the videos with little or no commentary, left the videos playing in front of an empty chair, and peppered their sessions with antics such as smoking cannabis and emitting “loud gastral intestinal emissions,” three new federal complaints assert. The lawsuits, each filed in the forum of a different Twitch broadcaster, also accuse the moderators of a popular Reddit message board of inducing the allegedly infringing broadcasts (Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. Majed, No. 2:25-cv-05565 (C.D. Cal. filed Jun. 19, 2025); Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. Saber, No. 2:25-cv-05564 (C.D. Cal. filed Jun. 19, 2025); Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. Caviness, No. 4:25-cv-00459-LMC (W.D. Mo. filed Jun. 19, 2025)).

The lawsuits were brought by Ethan and Hila Klein, two social media personalities who rose to prominence through their YouTube channels “h3h3Productions” and “Ethan and Hila.” At first, they created so-called “reaction videos” to other YouTube videos, which interspersed relatively short segments of the original video with longer segments of their commentary. They now maintain, through their company Ted Entertainment, Inc. (TEI), YouTube channels called The H3 Podcast and h3h3Productions. The videos they post on those sites, which collectively have about eight million subscribers, are less structured and more eclectic than their previous reaction videos.

The lawsuits have their roots in four events—one in the legal sphere, one in international geopolitics, one in the hazy universe of Reddit subchannels, and a fourth in the social media world of Twitch. The legal roots arise out of Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, a lawsuit that another blogger brought against the Kleins for one of their reaction videos. A Manhattan court granted summary judgment to the Kleins in 2017, finding that the video was “quintessential criticism and comment.” The doctrine that the Kleins took from that ruling, their complaint recites, is that reaction videos that “intersperse short segments of another’s work with criticism and commentary” constitute fair use—but reaction videos that are “more akin to a group viewing session” do not.

The second event was political—the terror attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. At the time of the attacks, Ethan Klein and alt-left stream Hasan Piker were co-hosting a series called Leftovers. The two had a falling out over the attacks and their collaboration ended shortly thereafter. In the wake of the falling out, the complaint asserts, Hasan “became a passionate advocate and highly charismatic leader of the Palestinian cause.” Hasan also, the complaint asserts, “used his massive platform to spread genocidal rhetoric” about Zionism and its Jewish supporters. (The Kleins emphasize in their complaint that they are “highly supportive of Palestinian self-determination and extremely critical of Israel and its government,” but that they “support a two-state solution as the best interim solution to the conflict.”).

Hasan’s falling out with the Kleins drew the attention of H3Snark, a message board (or a “subreddit,” as it is known) on the website Reddit. So-called “snark” subreddits like H3Snark, the complaint asserts, consist of “fallen fans” of a particular entertainer. The popularity of the H3Snark subreddit, which was aimed at the Kleins, grew rapidly after October 7, 2023. Despite “their hatred towards the Kleins, the complaint asserts, “the users of H3Snark had an insatiable appetite for TEI’s content.” But those users, the complaint alleges, “did not want TEI to receive any views or advertising revenue from their consumption of TEI’s content.” As a result, the complaint asserts, “H3Snark became a locus of copyright infringement of TEI content.” H3Snark did that, the complaint asserts, by encouraging its users to encourage “group viewing sessions” of the Kleins’ content—thus drawing away the Kleins’ user base.

Enter Twitch—and Twitch broadcasters Alexandra Marwa Saber, Kacey Caviness, and Morgan Kamal Majed (better known by their screen names Denims, Kaceytron, and Frogan). The three popular broadcasters, allegedly induced by H3Snark, held group viewing sessions of two of Kleins’ videos immediately after their official release—a timing that was “specifically intended,” the complaint asserts, “to siphon the maximum number of views and revenue away from TEI’s copyrighted work.” Unlike the reaction videos earlier hosted by the Kleins, the complaint asserts, these group viewing sessions involved little to no commentary of the underlying show.

To illustrate the lack of commentary and criticism involved in the Twitch broadcasts, the complaint includes highly colorful descriptions of those broadcasts. For example, the complaint asserts, Denims sometimes “goes off on tangents regarding unrelated subjects or shadowboxes demonstrably false misrepresentations of the contents,” “spreads misinformation that is refuted moments later by the Works themselves,” and sometimes “goes off-camera for an extended period of time while letting the video play.” Frogan, meanwhile, “plays long, unadulterated portions” of the works to her viewers, is often on her phone, and—like Denims—also does an “empty chair reaction” where she goes off-camera for several minutes while the work continues to play. Kaceytron, meanwhile, according to the complaint, “uses her group viewing session as an opportunity to engage in public degeneracy, such as continuously smoking copious quantities of cannabis” and peppering her sessions with “the sounds of loud gastral intestinal emissions.”

The three lawsuits, each filed against the individual Twitch broadcaster, accuse the broadcasters of direct copyright infringement and accuse the subreddit moderators of inducing that infringement.

The Cases are No. 2:25-cv-05565; No. 2:25-cv-05564; and No. 4:25-cv-00459-LMC.

Judges: Walter, J.; Hsu, W.; and Counts, L.

Attorneys: Rom Bar-Nissim (Heah Bar-Nissim LLP) for Ted Entertainment Inc.

Companies: Ted Entertainment Inc.

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