Background
Plaintiff Ted Entertainment, Inc., a production company owned by YouTuber Ethan Klein, filed a copyright infringement suit against Twitch streamer Alexandra Marwa Saber, known online as “Denims.” Klein accused Saber of infringing his copyright in Content Nuke: Hasan Piker (“The Nuke”), a 102-minute “tragi-comic documentary” posted to YouTube on January 31, 2025, which critiqued Twitch streamer Hasan Piker’s political views regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Within minutes of the documentary’s release, Saber began a livestream on Twitch in which she watched The Nuke in its near entirety over roughly four hours. During the stream, she paused the video 211 times, offered spontaneous reactions, engaged with her live chat audience, dismissed the documentary as resembling a “high school” or “middle school project,” pulled up external sources to challenge Klein’s claims, critiqued the editing and sourcing, and signed off by telling viewers: “if you enjoyed not giving any views to that terrible video, follow, subscribe, throw a prime.” Klein characterized Saber’s stream as a “lazy reaction video” that merely siphoned views from his original work.
Klein’s company sued three streamers in total, but only Saber continued to fight. After filing her Answer asserting fair use, Saber moved for judgment on the pleadings under Rule 12(c), asking Judge Wesley L. Hsu to declare her livestream fair use as a matter of law.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Hsu granted Saber’s motion, finding that all four statutory fair use factors, weighed together, established fair use as a matter of law.
Factor 1 — Purpose and character of the use: The court found Saber’s livestream was transformative. Her commentary showed the “telltale signs of transformative use”: a “further purpose or different character” and “the creation of new information, new aesthetic, new insights and understanding.” The court noted that “the fair use inquiry does not ask whether the criticism or parody is just or accurate, or mean-spirited . . . but simply whether the use is of the kind that copyright is designed to protect.” The court distinguished the case from Monge v. Maya Magazine, where a defendant engaged in “wholesale copying sprinkled with [spoken] commentary,” finding that Saber’s real-time criticism, analysis, and mockery “altered the purpose and character of the original work.” As to commerciality, while Saber earned revenue from subscriptions and donations on Twitch, the court held her transformative purpose “heavily outweighs the commercial nature of its use.” Factor 1 favored Saber.
Factor 2 — Nature of the copyrighted work: The court acknowledged The Nuke is a creative work with significant informational contents — containing original footage, montages, parodic skits, and archival materials. This factor weighed against fair use, but the court noted the Ninth Circuit has recognized this factor “has not been terribly significant in the overall fair use balancing.”
Factor 3 — Amount and substantiality used: While Saber displayed the “entirety (or nearly the entirety)” of The Nuke, the court held this was not dispositive. Citing Hosseinzadeh v. Klein and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, the court found that “to comment on and critique a work, clips of the original may be used” and that “copying does not become excessive in relation to parodic purpose merely because the portion taken was the original’s heart.” The amount used was “plainly necessary to the commentary and critique.” This factor did not weigh against Saber.
Factor 4 — Effect on the market: The court found Saber’s livestream was not a market substitute for The Nuke. “Anyone seeking to watch The Nuke, a scripted and edited documentary, would have a distinctly different experience watching Defendant’s fragmented start-and-stop livestream, which featured spontaneous reaction, live chat interaction, sharp criticism throughout and extrinsic source material.” The court also noted that Klein’s own complaint alleged Saber used The Nuke “for the exact opposite purpose,” further undermining any market substitution argument. Factor 4 favored Saber.
With three of four factors strongly favoring the defendant — including the most important factor (purpose and character of use) — the court concluded fair use applied as a matter of law and granted judgment on the pleadings.
Key Takeaways
- Reaction livestreams can be fair use even when they show the entire original work. The court found that nearly four hours of start-and-stop viewing with 211 pauses for commentary, criticism, and live-chat interaction transformed the underlying documentary, following the approach of Hosseinzadeh v. Klein and Stebbins v. Alphabet.
- The criticism does not have to be fair or accurate to be “fair use.” The court emphasized that copyright law protects commentary and criticism regardless of whether it is “just or accurate, or mean-spirited” — what matters is whether the use is the kind copyright is designed to protect.
- Commercial monetization on platforms like Twitch does not defeat fair use. Even though Saber earned revenue from subscriptions and donations during the stream, the court held this was distinguishable from “intentional exploitation of copyrighted works for monetary gain” and was outweighed by the highly transformative nature of her use.
- Opposite audience and purpose undercut market harm. Klein’s own allegation that Saber used his work “for the exact opposite purpose” actually helped her fair use defense by demonstrating the livestream was not a market substitute for the documentary.
Why It Matters
This ruling is one of the most significant fair use decisions for the online content creator economy in recent years. Ethan Klein — who himself benefited from the landmark Hosseinzadeh v. Klein ruling in 2017 that protected his own reaction videos — found that same precedent turned against him when he sued a streamer for reacting to his work. The decision affirms that livestreamed reaction content with genuine, sustained commentary enjoys robust fair use protection, even when it incorporates the entirety of the original work and is monetized on the streaming platform.
For content creators, the ruling draws a clear line: what Klein called “lazy reaction” — watching with minimal commentary — may indeed be infringement, but a streamer who actively critiques, pauses, challenges sources, and interacts with a live audience is engaged in exactly the kind of transformative commentary fair use was designed to protect. The decision also signals that courts will scrutinize whether the reaction and the original truly compete in the same market, or whether they serve fundamentally different audiences with different purposes.
Surfaced via Law360 IP. Full tentative decision available from the C.D. Cal. website.