Weekly Scroll: Content Nukes and Google Pukes
The future of fair use and the middle class internet are now in question
It’s the Weekly Scroll! I hope you’re all having a beautiful long weekend on this Memorial Day. Fun fact about me: I am constitutionally incapable of remembering when certain holidays are. I know Christmas is in December and Thanksgiving is in November, but gun to my head I could not tell you when holidays like Labor Day, President’s Day, Columbus Day, etc, happen. I only know it’s Memorial Day because my wife reminded me.
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The Ethan Klein Lawsuit and the Limits of Fair Use
Ethan Klein is a YouTuber/podcaster who’s run the channel h3h3Productions alongside his wife Hila since 2011. In the 2010’s they mostly produced reaction videos and sketch comedy, but in the past 6-7 years they’ve shifted into podcasting, news cycle commentary, and getting into political beefs with other large content creators.
I would normally rather peel off my own fingernails with a pair of rusty pliers than recount the sordid nonsense that comes along with political podcasters yelling at each other about which of them is really the most fascist. But there’s some genuinely interesting and impactful stuff going on with Klein right now, so stick with me through the stupid drama, because we need to talk about the Content Nuke Lawsuit.
The background: Klein and Hasan Piker used to be quite friendly, and even had a podcast together called Leftovers. The podcast ended abruptly after they recorded, you guessed it, an episode on Israel/Palestine. Klein is an American Jew, his wife is Israeli, and Piker is Piker. Since their acrimonious breakup, they’ve had a long-running feud where each has harshly criticized the other, and last year Klein released a video titled Content Nuke: Hasan Piker which attacks Piker as part of the ongoing feud.
When the Content Nuke dropped, this sparked a frenzy amongst the too-online livestreamer drama community. Creators like Klein and Piker are big enough to have ‘orbiters’: smaller creators circling larger stars who praise their content, criticize their enemies, and build relevance and clout as part of the larger streamer’s extended universe. A number of Hasan-adjacent orbiters decided to livestream the Content Nuke video, and that’s where the trouble comes in. It’s fairly common practice in livestreaming to watch other people’s content and provide your own thoughts and commentary along the way, but in the case of creators Frogan, Kaceytron, and Denims, each explicitly framed their stream as an attempt to prevent Klein from making money. Denims closed her stream by saying “If you enjoyed not giving any views to that terrible video, follow, subscribe, throw a prime”, asking her audience to compensate her for Klein’s video in place of giving money or views to Klein. Afterwards, Klein sued those three creators for copyright infringement, alleging they were rebroadcasting large portions of his content with minimal transformation or commentary and intentionally trying to deprive him of ad revenue.
Of the three accused, Kaceytron folded first. In December last year, she posted one of the most remarkable apologies I’ve ever seen, practically a hostage video where she read in monotone a series of statements about how she was guilty, was paying the Kleins, and gave a detailed, groveling apology for being an awful person. Seriously, if you happen to have a humiliation kink (no judgment), this video will keep you going for weeks:
Meanwhile, it appears that Frogan simply didn’t show up for court. Last week, a U.S. District Court in California entered a default judgment in favor of the Kleins after Frogan failed to enter a plea. Frogan, who raised almost $40,000 to pay for her legal defense, appears to have opted for the bold strategy of pocketing the money and not defending herself at all. Which leaves only Denims actively fighting Klein’s lawsuit.
Denims has defended her rebroadcast of the Content Nuke as fair use, a transformation of the original content allowed under copyright law. Ironically, Ethan Klein was involved in one of the precedent-setting fair use cases for online commentary, Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, in which Klein defended himself from a similar claim and won. The details of Denims’ case are genuinely interesting and could be interpreted in multiple ways by a court. In her defense, the experience of watching the Denims stream was much different than watching the video itself. The video is about an hour and forty minutes, while Denims’ stream was nearly four hours and included more than 200 pauses where Denims provided her own thoughts.
The blue bars above represent times when the video was paused and Denims was providing commentary, the gray represents time when the video was playing. If you watch the stream, Denims does engage with the content, often disputing Klein’s arguments and pushing back on claims he makes.
But it’s not enough to provide some commentary. Transformative use exists on a spectrum, and Klein argues that Denims’ reaction video is not truly transformative. In the case Klein won defending himself against copyright claims, the length of his commentary was more than three times the length of the original video. Denims’ ratio is almost one-to-one, and the commentary is often incredibly surface level or flat-out unrelated to the Content Nuke. She frequently let the video play for long periods of time uninterrupted, and even left the room at times - leaving just an empty chair and the copyrighted content playing.
Plus, there’s the small factor that she literally said on air the purpose of the stream was to deprive Klein of ad revenue. And her audience certainly understood it that way - from Exhibit K in the lawsuit:
Prognostication time: I think Klein is likely to win this suit on the merits. But it’s not a sure thing, because the copyright issues around reaction videos aren’t yet fully worked out. This case may end up defining exactly how transformative a reaction video must be before it can be considered fair use, and it’s all because two podcasters couldn’t stop yelling at each other about Israel. What a world.
AI Attempts to Pronounce WWE
Here’s an AI-generated professional wrestling news channel on YouTube attempting to pronounce WWE. However weird you think this is about to get, I promise you it’s funnier and weirder than that:
What Happens in a Zero Search World?
Is Google Search dying? And more importantly, is Google voluntarily killing it? Maybe so, as TechCrunch reports that the era of ten blue links is officially over:
At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
Tech pundits have long wondered whether or not AI chatbots would kill search engines. It’s a fair question. Personally, I still use search for most mundane searches - but these days when I have something more complicated I often just ask ChatGPT to find it for me. Search makes up about half of all revenue for Google, so they’re surely aware of this competitive threat.
But despite the hypothetical and anecdotal arguments above, Search isn’t actually struggling right now. Search brought in $175 billion in revenue for Google in 2023, grew to $198 billion in 2024, and then grew again to $224 billion in 2025. That’s a 13% year-over-year growth rate, which is pretty phenomenal for what is literally one of the largest businesses on the planet. So far the age of AI hasn’t displaced search at all.
Despite that, Google seems to be determined that if anyone’s going to kill search, it’s going to be them. AI-mode isn’t the default experience, but it seems clear we need to attach a ‘yet’ to that statement. Google is signaling pretty hard that in the future, more and more search queries will be answered with AI-generated boxes or a fully AI-built experience.
I can imagine an argument in favor of this strategy. Kodak was early to digital camera technology, but famously failed to take advantage of that early start because they were worried about how it might impact their physical film business. Google may be trying to avoid the same error here - if search is as doomed as film photography, better to disrupt yourself rather than wait for someone else to do it. And to be fair, Google is both a hyperscaler and a leading competitor in cutting-edge AI models. They’re well positioned to make this transition.
But it’s unclear to me whether this transition needs to be made at all - and beyond that, what the impacts are for the rest of the internet. The failed pivot to video and the enormous decline of social media traffic are two examples of transformations that decimated independent publishers, content creators and businesses online. But the rise in zero-click searches - where a user’s search query leads to no clickthrough and thus no traffic for any website other than Google - threatens to be even more catastrophic for the independent web. The Verge calls this Google Zero, and we may not be far off from the day when traffic from search engines to independent websites does literally hit zero.
What happens then? The social internet that I grew up with, the internet I loved and obsessed over, was built not by giant platforms but by a million hands doing weird stuff independently, a middle class of creatives who made the web great. In a world where traffic from both search engines and social media is near-zero, how does anything independent ever grow? How can any business be financially viable outside a small handful of giant platforms? Let’s think through the consequences of a world where the biggest companies in the world hoover up all of the text and data on the internet train to their AI models, then use those models to deny the people writing the text any traffic. I’m not sure I like where that’s going! I’m trying and failing to see any outcome besides the collapse of the middle class of online creators, permanent lock-in to closed ecosystems, and a degraded set of incentives to produce new and meaningful work.
Meanwhile! Here’s what happens now when you google the word disregard:
We might be destroying the internet as we know it, but hey, at least the AI’s also broken.
They Invented a New Kind of Guy
Links
Along more serious lines - a great piece from Derek Thompson on the decline of virtue in politics. This might be familiar to those who remember the Vice Signaling debate.
Man who spent 37 days in jail for posting a Charlie Kirk meme wins $835,000 settlement.
Roblox is finally getting serious about growing with users 18 years or older.
The metric that ruined every website.
How deepfakes tore apart a high school.
A bizarre but funny niche Wikipedia scandal.
Posts
Zohran Mamdani streamed on Twitch for the first time - with an open chat - and it went about how you’d expect.