Welcome back. Now if you didn't see my previous video about the socalled Omegaverse lawsuit, I suggest you go and do that now. It's Tiger King for her!
And also engage with it, give it a like, give it a comment. Because the algorithm was not kind to that one and it did not show up in most subscribers' recommendations. Hmm. Weird. In fact, while you're here, go ahead and give this a like. Give it a comment. Give it several comments. Get in fights in the comments. Drive that engagement. Because this... Well, I don't want to say this is war, but... Honey, you got a big storm comin' Now let me start by saying that I had never intended to make this video AT ALL. Like most of my videos (except for Game of Thrones, which I will die mad about)-- Your lips are moving and you're complaining about something. That's winging. --that was supposed to be one and done. But then SOMEONE had to go and get me involved in the whole thing. Now, one way or the other, I had to take September off in order to finish revisions on my second book which is out next fall. It's called Truth of the Divine. You can, uh... well, it's not available for preorder yet. I don't know. I'll pimp it later. But also, a LOT went down in the month of September and there was a lot of documentation that I had to go through. in order to cobble together as coherent a narrative as I'm about to attempt to make. Now before we get started, a note. Yes, despite my costume, this is not theatre. This is all real. This is really happening. And that also And that also said, Addison Cain and I are both, regrettably, technically, public figures. Now that said, despite my request that you do not harass this woman from the last video, some of you were shitty anyway. And I get that we're all bored and losing our minds and that like, you know, cancelling is fun now. But again, I'd like to ask you to not. Like this guy. We don't need to bring her shitty book into it. I know I'm not on the hook if any of you idiots post cringe in her @s, or on her Facebook page, but it is, as the kids say, a bad look. Now that said, with regard to the last video, I feel like I was pretty evenhanded with the criticisms I made and the conclusions I drew. But I definitely withheld a lot of criticisms and comments about Addison Cain because I was concerned that they might... be a little unnecessarily mean.
But trust, I feel no such obligation this time. So before we begin, a refresher on the dramatis personae. Addison Cain. Not her real name. Erotica author who claims to have spearheaded the concept of het omegaverse or abo. And who has a knack for accusing her fellow authors of plagiarism because her ideas are just that good. Zoey Ellis, also not her real name, and one of the alleged plagiarists Who, in 2018, sued Addison Cane for alleged abuse of DMCA takedown notices. She is also, in my opinion, correct. Those takedown notices were illegal and abusive. Blushing Books, Addison Cain's former publisher. Who gleefully threw themselves in front of the bus for Addison Cain during the lawsuit, only to be hilariously betrayed by her and backstabbed later, and she hates them now. And they are also on her eternity quest for revenge. Patreon. Yes, really. The membership website that my company relies on for most of our income. YouTube, this hellspace. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading legal nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech and innovation that I plugged at the end of the last video. And also my lawyers! Tynia Watson, a "lawyer," shown here getting brunch with her client, Addison Cain, in a public Facebook post that SOMEBODY wanted me to see. Actually, several posts. Like, "Yeah, you know, I'm just getting lunch with my lawyer. Just some girls talking about copyright law." Gal pals! So, that crazy month of September. What happened? The video went public early on September 3rd I was trying to get away from it. Again, that was supposed to be revision month. But later that day, I get this email from Tynia Watson Saying all that weird shit. Like, yes, I am a barred lawyer in the state of Oklahoma. If you want the truth, go to my client's Facebook page. Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else noticed? You don't need doubletalk. You need Bob Loblaw. Bon Loblaw no habla espanol. Thing about it is this email didn't even have any like threat of litigation in it. It wasn't like take it down or else. Or take it down or we'll sue. It was just... take it down! Gal pals! So I decided to milk that for some content, because it was indeed very funny. I posted it to Twitter and decided to move on. But of course, that was not the end of it. The following day I get an email from the head of legal at Patreon, Colin Sullivan. You see, Addison Cain has sent a DMCA takedown notice to Patreon demanding that I take the post about Omegaverse down. Honestly, yeah, I was kind of surprised. Like the entire video was about how dumb and abusive and transparently flimsy her DMCA case was. But we're still doing this, I guess. So what Addison Cain apparently failed to even consider is that unlike companies like Amazon and YouTube, Patreon is not a giant faceless conglomerate. Not only am I one of Patreon's top creators, so of course they're going to investigate any wrongdoing I'm accused of, they also took the time to watch the video and found the whole situation a touch ironic. So I talked to the legal team at Patreon for a while, we discussed some options, and what we decided was that they, in order not to be on the hook legally just in case litigation came down the pike... we will honor that DMCA takedown notice. And all that meant was that I had to unlink the YouTube URL from the Patreon post for ten days. And then relink it. So I send the DMCA counternotice and Patreon basically tells Addison Cain and her "lawyer" that they have ten days to sue me or I can do whatever I want with the content. And here's the thing, despite my years and years of doing this, I've never actually gotten a DMCA takedown notice before. But here's the other thing, Patreon was so... I guess the word was offended that she thought this would work that they were like, hey...if you were to, I don't know, end up in court... one way or the other.... we would stand behind you and you know, maybe fund your legal fees. Like that would be a first! Now, during this whole time, despite all these behind the scenes machinations, publicly, she's weirdly quiet about the whole thing. She has to this date not said anything on her Twitter or her public Fcebook or her private Facebook. However, on September 5th, rather than say something about me, she instead redirects her ire and her fans to another author. And we will get to that too. And although I cannot say for certain that she had anything to do with this, other strange goings on happened with that video and my channel in general. Somebody reported the ads as having violence and terrorism in it, and full nudity. And YouTube review is like yeah, that checks out so I had to demonetize the thing. Someone reported the URL to Twitter, meaning that sometimes when the URL popped up it would be clocked as "not safe." And someone was reporting the video meaning that it was age restricted as recently as last week. Since lifted. But maybe that's all just a huge coincidence even though none of those things have ever happened to me before. In my ten years of doing this. Big old coincidence. During this time, Addison Cain also hires a PR person. And on September 9th, she emails entertainment journalist, Kayleigh Donaldson asking if she wants to softball an interview with Addison Cain. Kayleigh, of course, posted this email to Twitter and it was very funny. We privately speculated that maybe it was because she was a known fan of the morally questionable monster love genre. But because of that, one of the very last book reviews she did was of my book. So I know what you're all thinking. She sends the DMCA notice to Patreon... Why? And we puzzled over this. Why go for Patreon? The content is not hosted on Patreon. It's hosted on YouTube and Nebula. Well, it turns out, she did go for YouTube. On Friday, September 11th, I get an email from Youtube saying, Hey... someone sent us as DMCA takedown notice. We looked into it and we think it's bogus. Umm... Because we think this probably falls under fair use, so we're gonna ignore it. I have never heard of this ever happening. Of YouTube actually getting a DMCA takedown notice and saying...no. Because as we discussed in the last video, that puts YouTube possibly legally liable if Wolfcock Karen decides to start suing people. But as we have already learned, when a platform gets a DMCA takedown notice, they have to send the notice to the person being accused of copyright infringement. Meaning I got the letter that Addison Cain sent YouTube and... Oh, I am going to milk the shit out of that. All right, lets break this batshittery down, shall we? Yes, I'm still wearing the falsies. Like, this is as much effort as you're gonna get look-wise. This isn't Contrapoints. Cause I don't want this to be an hour of pwnage, this is an opportunity. We can make this a learning experience. So let's break this apart. Copyrighted material is copyrighted material whether it's an educational textbook or wolf porn. That said, the sum total of Cain's work that we used was about 400 words. About two minutes out of an hour long video. Yeah, I don't really do reviews. Fair use actually encompasses a lot more than that. That said, we didn't just include copyrighted material for shits and giggles. We included it to give examples of the content that was being fought over. I mean I know it feels personal, maybe, but I didn't say anything about Addison Cain outside of what was relevant to the court case. The reason I cam down the way I did was because I looked at the evidence, and was like hm. There's kind of a clear right and wrong side here. That said, we seem to be in disagreement of what the outcomes even were. But I'll get to that later. I don't usually ask for permission. When people talk about fair use they usually restrict it to educational purposes, criticism and parody. And they don't seem to think that it can exist outside of that. But it actually does go further. The other key word here is "transformative" and that's sort of the ironic thing here with her letter at all is she's upset that I did a dramatic reading of her work and blacked out some of the words. Thereby transforming it, lending MORE credence to fair use. It doesn't actually have anything to do with whether it's monetized or not. Like it being commercial kind of works against the argument. But you can monetize things and it still be fair use. You know, reviewers and critics have careers. Now the reason why monetizing your content can work against fair use isn't because like, you know, it's commercial and non-profits are better or more moral or something. It has to do with the market for the original copyrighted material. The standard when you make money off of someone else's copyrighted material is "does this substitute or destroy the original market?" And a YouTube video about court cases isn't going to substitute the market for erotica. Does my monetizing this content destroy her market? And the answer is obviously no. The only way you could argue that I would harm the market is if I made the book look bad by saying it's bad. And...that's fair use. There's nothing you can do about that. Criticism does not count as destroying the market. Even though I didn't actually criticize her dumb book. But while we're on this subject, I did have some empathy for Addison Cain before the video went up. Because as a New York Times bestselling author I do know what it's like for people to shit on your book and monetize them shitting on your book. I know what it's like for some of these people to shit on your book while getting tens of thousands of views. And if you want to go outside the book stuff, I know what it's like for a lot of people to personally target me to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of views. It sucks. It really f*cking sucks. But here's the thing: It's not copyright infringement. And technically, it's not illegal. I can't really even claim that it's defamation, which is ironic because every time one of those dipshits' videos get taken down, they think I did it. Like I've even f*cking watched any of them. No one cares about your response video, Gary. But that is the thing. People can monetize themselves saying shit about you that you don't like. And if you're a public figure, there is not a lot you can do about it unless they say something that is objectively, patently untrue. And even then, it's still an uphill battle.
Sucks, huh? So as I said no, I do not actually think that the subject of a video that I made about a person known for making bad faith DMCA takedown notices would make a bad faith takedown DMCA notice on my video, but... I don't know... Maybe there's.... I don't know, there's some-- I feel like there's a term for this? Some sort of effect? Hokay. Let's look at the allegations. No, I didn't. Wow, no. No, I didn't even a little bit allege that. I don't know where the hell you got that. Yeah, about the the perjury thing: I guess you could say that I implied it, but I didn't say it. I did say what actually did happen was that the plaintiff accused Cain of perjuring herself and then three days later a judgement was filed by the court. And this was one mistake I did make. You see, there was no settlement. It was not a settlement. It was a judgement. A judgement is an official designation that is entered on a court's docket that designates that a plaintiff has prevailed against the defendant in a court case. Plaintiff in the Oklahoma case, Quill Ink's Books prevailed over the defendant, Blushing Books. There was no settlement. That was my mistake. Sorry guys. It did close for unrelated reasons. The Oklahoma case was closed after Blushing Books admitted wrongdoing, and the Virginia case was closed for lack of prosecution. These things had nothing to do with each other. They were completely unrelated. One thing I have not really touched on yet is the letter that Tynia Watson had sent to Patreon. Okay, here's the thing. It's not substantive enough to be like, you know, fun to read the way the other one was, so I'm just break it down. If you really do have a good faith belief that this is copyright infringement, I find it interesting that you would mention defamation or harassment at all. Because those things do not have anything to do with whether or not my use of the 400 words of Born to Be Bound was copyright infringement. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp 2016: It does not work like that. "You hurt my feelings ipso facto copyright infringement." That's not how copyright works. Infringement is infringement whether your feelings are hurt or not. I actually kind of like this wolf hat. I'm gonna star wearing this. It's got pockets. None of my clothes do. Paws. Furry solidarity. So that's just me, but what about everybody else? What about the other.... I don't want to say victims. Targets of Addison Cain's disdain, shall we say. First and most obvious is Zoey Ellis who filed the original lawsuit. Who alleges that Cain's publisher at the direction of Cain filed dozens of DMCA takedown notices Is that specific enough for you? I mean she does also allege that Cain herself sent some of them, but we're keeping it simple But that wasn't all there was to it when we're talking about the defamation side of the lawsuit. Basically, Ellis also alleges that Cain spent a lot of time and effort sh*ttalking her to the community. And since we're talking about self-published erotica, authors kind of live and die a lot more on networking than they do on the traditional side. And so if Addison Cain is running around in all these, like, Omegaverse Facebook groups saying, like, hey this woman is plagiarizing me, that's kind of a bad look for the accused. Then there's author, Nora Ash, who was an early proponent of Zoey Ellis when she was first entering authordom. And this is another mistake/redaction I need to make. Patricia Briggs, who I said was the first Omegaverse author was not actually that. She wrote kinda werewolfy stuff You know there was some--obviously it was called Alpha and Omega but like it didn't have most of the tropes that we associate with abo The first het commercial omegaverse author was Nora Ash. Not Addison Cain. Part of her crime was being an early champion of Zoey Ellis. But another part of it was the fact that she repeated pointed out that she was the first commercially published het omegaverse author... god, this is like... The specificity is really important in the erotica wars, okay? Anyway, Nora Ash alleges that Cain also threw her clout around to damage her brand in the author community. Then there's Lee Savino, and now we're getting into the like really wild sh*t. Lee Savino does not write abo. She's more in the vein of dark werewolfy romance sort of thing. Also a former friend of Addison Cain as so many of these women are. And I'm not exactly clear on when Addison Cain decided that Lee Savino was actually in the enemy's camp in this grand conspiracy against her. But the long and short is that Cain decided that Lee Savino knew damning things about Zoey Ellis and Nora Ash, and so she subpoenad Lee Savino in her counterclaim in the Virginia lawsuit. So you remember how earlier I mentioned that she didn't say anything about my video but instead redirected her ire to another author? Well, this is that author, and here's what she said: Thing is, I do have a copy of that subpoena, and I have absolutely no problem making public what she thinks is such a big deal. Of course, it was like long, winding conspiratorial nonsense, but the long and short is that she demanded that Lee Savino produce all documents relating to Margarita Coale, Eva Dresden-- and remember those names, we'll get to them--Addison Cain, Zoey Ellis, and Nora Ash. The latter two, again, are both in the UK and are harder to get information on. Oh, but that's not all! Lee Savino is also a "plagiarist." But she didn't copy a plot, she copied a character. So here's part of the letter that Tynia Watson sent Lee Savino when they were forced to drop the counterclaim in Virginia. "Return the witch!" Like I cannot read her mind. I don't know what's in her heart, but according to her, this is a character she's been writing for like ten years, and she has no idea where Cain decided that this character and this character alone was plagiarized from one of Cain's books. Oh, and Addison Cain also accused Savino of reporting her Facebook ads to Facebook as being inappropriate. Huge if true! Then there's author Eva Dresden, also an author in this community, also subpoenad in the Virginia case. Basically the exact same sh*t. Like, give me dirt on this, this, this, and this person. So Dresden takes this seriously and has to hire a lawyer, and ends up spending a ton of money on this whole nonsense thing only to have Cain drop the subpoena when Quill gets dismissed from the Virgnia case for lack of prosecution. Courney Milan is not an omegaverse author, but is fairly well known in the more traditional historical romance community. And so Milan basically got involved in this when someone reached out to her like, hey... you're a lawyer. What do you think of this whole thing? And Milan looked at it, and she opined on Twitter basically that she thought Cain was in the wrong and this is obviously not plagiarism. It's just too broad, it's too tropey, this is scènes à fair. This is not how plagiarism works. And so Milan, a person that Cain has never really interacted with or talked to is now also on the list of eternity vengeance quest. Here she is harassing Milan on Twitter. Here she is dragging Milan on her personal Facebook. Here's Tynia Watson mention her in her letter to me And here is the formal ethics complaint Cain filed against Courtney Milan with the Romance Writers of America Is there no manager she won't complain to? To be clear, all this sturm und drang is because Courtney Milan who has a pretty solid base of legal knowledge expressed an opinion about the court case on twitter.com She never said anything about Cain as a person. So what's funny to me about this Twitter exchange is that Milan, despite having a law degree, "can't really understand what's going on because she's not a barred lawyer." Meaning she's not practicing. But Addison Cain, who thinks monetizing content exempts it from fair use, is the legalest expert that ever legaled. Oh, but one other funny thing that happened just as I was editing this, is I got an email from Courtney Milan saying, hey, I actually remembered who it was that originally reached out to me about the omegaverse lawsuit. And wouldn't you know.... it was Addison Cain. Well, that backfired. Margarita Coale. This is Zoey Ellis's lawyer. Now Coale is a lawyer that represents a lot of authors and like IP and like rights and stuff. She's like that kind of lawyer. Formerly a bankruptcy lawyer. This comes into it, believe it or not. Now, according to Coale, she originally got involved with Zoey Ellis by getting onto one of her mailing lists and then eventually they started talking about rights and stuff, then Zoey Ellis reached out to her, whenever she started getting all these DMCA takedown notices. Now, I bring this all up because Cain has repeatedly alleged that Margarita Coale has had like this weird obsessive vendetta against Addison Cain for years saw an opportunity with Zoey Ellis and all these DMCA takedowns, and is therefore the mastermind of this whole thing. And kina like Milan, she does the thig where she's like "Well, you're a bankruptcy lawyer. How can you possibly know about copyright infringement?" And this is kind of a running theme with Cain's aspersions against people. Like, Milan isn't barred, therefore she cannot opine on the whole case unless it's in favor of Cain. And Margarita Coale doesn't know what she's doing because she WAS a bankruptcy lawyer at some point in history. Even though she's not anymore. Oh, but that's not all! Blushing Books and Addison Cain, alleges Margarita Coale (covering my ass), has filed three bar complaints against this woman over the last two years. And I know I have to say "alleged" to cover my ass, but like I do have a copy of one of these bar complaints, and it was Blushing that filed it, and it was during the freaking lawsuits. So they filed a bar complaint against an opposing lawyer as ongoing litigation was happening. And again it is a sort of conspiracy. Like, "She read an arc she didn't like and she's been trying to take down Addison Cain for years!" And also "She's got like 80 sock puppets and here are examples of all of them." Ergo bar complaint. And again, according to Coale, a new bar complaint was filed by Addison Cain on August 26, 2020. Less than two months ago. And finally, surprisingly, Blushing Books. Blushing has alleged that Addison Cain was the person who reported them to the RWA and is therefore the reason they are on advocacy alert. Now we reached out to the RWA to confirm that, and they declined to comment because they don't give names for that sort of thing. But based on an email that Blushing sent to Courtney Milan, the only romance lawyer, they do believe it was Cain. And of course Cain made all sorts of wild allegations against Blushing, including like book burning and breach of contract.... How many of you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George? So, why bring all of this up? Well, originally, this video was meant to be sort of a learning experience about copyright. But obviously, this isn't about copyright. Some people just want other people to shut up. And sometimes she uses copyright law to do it. But most of the time, she doesn't. Like, the way she uses this word "defamation" just so eagerly. I'm reminded of the way that el presidente is just so eager to expand libel laws in the US to be like the ones in the UK.
So really this isn't even about copyright law anymore. And it never was. It's about deplatforming. Cain has people she doesn't like. She wants to deplatform them. Just sometimes she uses the DMAC to do it. And I think this is really interesting because while I think she's wrong and is definitely abusing systems that are in place to protect people, it does kind of highlight a major problem. Which is that platforms don't really care about abuse. They don't care about harassment. And before you go there, Addison, no by no meaningful definition, legal or ethical, does this count as defamation, abuse, or harassment. However, as someone who has multiple times been on the wrong side of coordinated harassment campaigns, and is also friends with people who have gone through way, way worse, including having to move, sometimes move cities, I feel like I can say with some certainty, that platforms don't take harassment seriously. But you know what they do take seriously? Copyright. As a for instance, here again we have the president of the United States sharing a bad meme using Nickleback's Photograph. Well, Nickleback was successful in getting that tweet taken down because they filed a DMCA takedown. Similarly, there are examples of counter-protestors blasting copyrighted music at alt right rallies so it can't get uploaded in its raw form and will also therefore be taken down. Which, while effective, also swings in the other direction, because counter-protestors have been known to do that to, for instance, BLM using the exact same tactics. The pendulum swings both ways. And even in the Nickleback case, while ethically, good for them, I honestly don't think that counts as copyright infringement. It's a dumb shitty meme, but I think that, personally....eugh...it's transformative enough that it would count as fair use. If it were taken to court.
Oh, god, I'm imagining that... no.... please... no... So it really is no wonder that there are people who feel like copyright law and the DMCA is a perfectly valid way to suppress speech they don't like. Bot Addison Cain and her lawyer, Tynia Watson, say as much in their DMCA complaint. And neither Addison nor her lawyer seem to care that it doesn't matter why you want the infringing material taken down. Copyright exists to protect your share of the market. Not to protect you from "defamation" or things that might make you look bad. Hey, Angelina, what the hell is taking so long with this edit? Yeah, uh, sorry, sorry! I've just been so busy with my damn baby that it's starting to take over my brain. It's like how you can't call your damn baby a damn baby unless you are like the most wretched person in the world and not like you're a mom who's constantly overloaded with a toddler who's screaming for you nonstop. And the fact that you just want to call her a damn baby to your friends over a glass of wine doesn't necessarily make you a bad person Gah! You're always going on about your damn baby! Yeah, of course, I won't say anything else about the damn baby--Damn baby! Damn baby. Well, of course this wasn't the end of it. EFF did decide to take me on. So they sent a letter to Tynia Watson, explaining why all of the stuff in her letter was wrong. And...umm...I don't know. I kind of genuinely did think that would be the end of it. Like, I didn't think... I didn't think they'd respond. But they did. Yeah, let's, uh... Let's see what they said. OT--? The people who own AO3? The fanfiction website? How long do you think it takes to read a few paragraphs? God dammit, you f*cking assh*le! It's the champagne of beers. Oh my god I can't believe I even need to say this. Neither EFF nor OTW has anything to do with the production of that video. No collusion. To date, I have not made a donation to EFF, especially since the damn video was demonetized. I only chose EFF because they were a nonprofit that was relevant to the topics of the court case. But Jesus Christ, the moon logic of bringing the OTW into this. Like, I don't even have an AO3 account. I have no contact or affiliation with OTW. I did reach out to them about this video, and they left me on read. The only connection I have with OTW is I wrote one article for them earlier this year, when my book came out, that nobody read. And I lost a Hugo to them last year. For best related work. You guys deserved to win the Hugo. It's fine. But the moon logic of even connecting OTW to this case is that Ellis's lawyers hired Christina Bucey as their expert witness on the topic of fanfiction, and she happens to be on the board of OTW. So this letter definitely does fall into a pattern with regard to people and lawyers, which is, "you know what? The actual client, they're just dupes. They're ignorant laymen, you know? We attack the lawyers who are the real masterminds." In this case, the fact that the EFF has worked with OTW before on completely unrelated things, means that there is a fan fiction deep state keen on taking Addison Cain down. Well, you're claim that I am a legally ignorant layman kind of works against all that stuff that you're so mad about because clearly, I don't know what I'm talking about. My opinions, as expressed in the video, were good faith interpretations of the facts that I had as I understood them. And I may not have a law degree, but I do have a little tool you may not have heard of. It's called Google. To claim defamation against a public figure like Addison Cain, you have to show "actual malice" that you published with either knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Which I did not.
But a lot of stuff that Addison and her lawyer Tynia are so mad about... Well, I got my interpretation of it actually from lawyers, but not lawyers that I know. It's from a podcast called All Lawyers Are Bad. And they read out loud about as much copyrighted material as I did. And they were also a lot harsher. Going so far as to call Cain things like... They also use her real name a lot, which I never did. So, I wonder, why did they never get a DMCA takedown notice or emails from her lawyer, Tynia? Uh huh. I guess that'll do it. Maybe I should have called her hot. Then again, I don't think that would have saved me. It does not escape my notice that every single person that Cain has allegedly targeted is a woman. Poetic that the charity she wants me to donate to is anti-girl-on-girl bullying. But wait, you say. Maybe she didn't even know about this podcast. Oh no, mon frere, she did. And something that one of the guys in the podcast said inspired her to commission fanart of herself drinking the blood of her enemies. Yeah, you know, I'm just having a normal one. Sitting on my throne of bones. Drinking the blood of my enemies. Drinking the blood of her enemies, but she's the bullied one. And then we get to this anti-bullying charity at the end. Where it's like trying to gaslight people into believing that THEY are the bullies and that THEY are the ones with behavior that needs to be atoned for. "I can't be a bully! I simply am the person demanding that that you be better." "All of those other people making accusations against me? Well, THEY were not the bullied ones. I was the bullied one! They were the bullies." "Any action I took against them, I had to take it! It's totally normal that there are so many of them and they all kind of have the same story." And you ever notice how people who crow about victimhood the loudest tend to be bullies themselves? Now, that said, I did make a couple hundred dollars off of it before it got demonetized. So, as a gesture of good faith, I went ahead and donated the money that would have gone to EFF to the Kind Campaign. Are we square? And I don't want this to be the Addison Cain drama channel. I genuinely hope this is the last video I make on this subject. By which, I mean I hope we don't go to court. That said, it is petty fandom bullshit, but it does real harm. In the great Regina George tradition, this does have impact on people's lives. Every single author that I talked to (except Courtney Milan) said that their careers have been harmed by everything Addison Cain has done. From DMCA on to petty fandom bullshit.
Now that said, to reiterate myself: Don't harass her, god damn it! She blames me for every single one of you idiots that are shitty to her on social media. I understand the energy needing to go somewhere. We're in quarantine and public shaming is fun. But if you really want to piss her off, instead of being an asshole on Twitter, support the authors that she has targeted. I was really glib about the whole erotica thing in the first video, and I kinda would like to backtrack that. Erotica is a real, legit genre, and if you're into it, go check them out. Most of it's a/b/o. Not for me. But it might be for you. Awoooo! Outside of that, there is Courtney Milan. She just had a book come out that features and Asian hero. And that's something you never see in the US in a traditional romance publishing. So go check her out. And when I said I'm gonna milk the sh*t out of this, what of course I meant was merchandise. And no, I don't actually mean this shirt. You can't buy this. Elisa, the comment matriarch, has... she's been crafty lately, so she made this for me and a few friends as a joke. But! There is some stuff you can buy! And our good friends at DFTBA were super down with it. Of course we're very inspired by "Lindsay Ellis is a menace" so came up with a Saul Bass-inspired embossed pin you can get. I'd also love to thank Tynia Watson for coming up with this idea of the fanfiction deep state. Just loves it. Not a direct reference, per se, but we were definitely inspired by the myth of the Karen, let's say. And finally, my personal favorite, the "With prejudice" hat. Buy it for the lawyer in your life. They don't need to know the context. And if you do know the context, it's very funny. So enjoy our dumb merch. And join the #fanfictiondeepstate One last thing before we go. Patreon is a membership service, and my patrons are charged not by the content unit, but by the month. So if someone wanted to get into the weeds of monetization, they should understand that people who give money to my patreon are effectively paying for membership to me, which includes certain perks, ie name in credits. They are not paying for the content itself. They are in effect paying membership dues, and ain't no ads on this video, so it is going unmonetized. And while we're here, I'd like to thank the fine folks at Patreon for supporting creators, standing up for fair use, and for being all around a bunch of really solid menches. Thanks for watching. Which is the opposite of digital privacy.
Wow.
I both look forwards to and dread watching this video.
Just popping in halfway through the video to say: Lindsay Ellis is a menace, a threat to my child, and monetizing defamation for personal financial gain.
We need to dismantle the fanfiction deep state!
When even YouTube won't take down a video that receives a DMCA takedown notice...
It's crazy to think that Ellis essentially founded this genre of youtube video and now 10 years later is still incredibly fresh and charismatic.
Spoilers for the end of the video. I know Lindsey hopes this is the last video on this subject but god there is really no better way to start your morning then with a heaping helping of Wolf Erotica Legal Drama.
Oh god this is a daddy derek level situation
grabs popcorn
I'm normally not very much into drama like this, but by god this is entertaining as hell.
Honestly people in the 'mainstream' talking about abo fucking one shotted me, I cannot recover from this, leave the borderline furry erotica in the depths of AO3 please