Antifa ‘Photojournalists’ Sue Actual Journalist Andy Ngo for Copyright Infringement and Fail Hard – Opinion

During a Christmas week in which the news cycle was Omicron, Omicron, masks don’t work, vaccine mandates, Let’s Go Brandon, and Omicron, two Antifa “journalists” and their intrepid attorney made the wise decision to quietly dismiss a baseless copyright infringement lawsuit they’d filed against Andy Ngo 15 days earlier. While the suit’s filing was gleefully covered by The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and The Daily Dot, strangely, its dismissal only warranted updates by the same after one of Ngo’s attorneys, Harmeet Dhillon, tweeted about it.

Plaintiffs Grace Morgan and Melissa Lewis alleged that they were photojournalists covering Antifa events in Portland and that while they were putting their lives and health on the line Ngo was able to “sit behind a computer and steal [their] work” by utilizing a function where Twitter users can embed another user’s video in their tweet. While Ngo didn’t earn money from tweeting their videos, the duo claim he profited by

In the instances in which Ngo tweeted Morgan or Lewis’s videos, his tweets contained the complete original video (so not edited to distort what was occurring), the name of the user who originally uploaded the video (which might or might not have been the person who actually shot the video), and a link to that user’s Twitter account.

The screenshots below show that (archived version here(

In reality, Lewis and Morgan simply didn’t like that Ngo was tweeting their videos because Ngo isn’t down with the Antifa cause and his followers aren’t either, and they wanted to bully him by using the legal system. They claimed that Ngo was harassing them and they blocked him. This would have prevented him from embedding their videos into his tweets. It didn’t, because one can simply log out and view a Twitter profile as long as it’s a public profile and copy the link to the video in the manner provided by Twitter.

And while the pair claim that quote-tweeting videos (versus embedding them in a new tweet) isn’t copyright infringement, what practical difference does that make? Either way, their name and a link to their Twitter account is shown on Ngo’s tweet, making it just as easy for Ngo’s followers or anyone else to send hate tweets to them in response.

Here’s what one of their attorneys said to The Intercept:

Larry Zerner, a Los Angeles copyright lawyer who is the lead counsel for Morgan and Lewis, told me in a phone interview that what Ngo had done, by reporting on the October 1 protest using his clients’ video to illustrate his tweets, was no different than one television network illegally using a rival network’s video in a news report, without permission or payment. “ABC can’t just take NBC’s video and say, ‘This is the news,’” Zerner said.

Using Zerner’s logic, anyone who uses the embed function on a Twitter video or hits “quote tweet” on a video so they can add their own commentary is illegally using someone else’s “journalism.”

The lawsuit contains more of Zerner and co-counsel Alan Lloyd Kessler’s jurisprudential brilliance.

Plaintiffs have repeatedly posted videos to Defendant and he has reposted them online without Plaintiffs consent or permission, violating their copyrights.

A practice that defendant made was to Uploading or illegally copying Plaintiffs’ videos onto his own Twitter account (“@MrAndyNgo”).

When he uploads Plaintiffs’ videos to his own Twitter account, The credit to Plaintiffs included with the defense.

On October 2, 2021, Defendant Illegally copied and publishedMorgan Video is available on his Twitter stream.

“Illegally copying and uploading”? Ngo copied the URL and added it to a tweet. That’s literally it. It’s also incredible that an attorney could type the words “Defendant includes a credit for Plaintiffs” in a Complaint and then sign that complaint knowing that no Twitter user anywhere has the technical ability to include or exclude such a credit.

This lawsuit is ongoing:

Plaintiffs both banned Defendant’s Twitter account from following them, so that he could not see their videos and tweets.

Despite the fact that Plaintiffs have blocked Defendant from following them on their Twitter accounts, Defendant continues to upload and post Plaintiffs’ videos on his Twitter account.

It is important to note that Defendant is not “retweeting” Plaintiffs tweets. Because Defendant is blocked from viewing Plaintiffs’ tweets, he is not able to “retweet” Plaintiffs’ videos. Defendant must be using one or more alternate Twitter accounts to obtain the raw video URL from Plaintiffs’ posted videos, then deliberately copying the video URL from Plaintiffs’ videos into his own tweets.

If that’s the standard — that if one blocks another Twitter user they believe is harassing them or whose retweets lead to harassment, that Twitter user is prohibited from copying a URL from the blocker’s account, pasting it into a new tweet, and hitting send, then I’ve got numerous people to sue.

And as far as the “harassment” they allegedly receive from Ngo’s followers, if they’re actually “journalists,” they’d understand that being subjected to “mean tweets” goes with the territory. One element of the harassment they claim they’ve received is being referred to as Antifa journalists, yet in the lawsuit itself they are each referred to as “antifascists” and “journalists.” So they admit/claim right there that they are Antifa journalists.

Are they journalists or not? A colleague of Ngo’s at The Post-Millennial looked into the Plaintiffs’ backgrounds and found multiple instances in which they have been active protesters/rioters and calling for violence.