Pod relevance: Katie and Jesse discussed the #dropkiwifarms campaign when it was at its height and the j-man has even posted on the farms itself back in the day. Depending on how this turns out, we may end up with some precedence on internet censorship or legal legitimisation of the world's most controversial gossip forum.

I'm not sure if linking to kiwifarms is allowed on reddit, so I won't for now to prevent auto-deletion. Here's Josh Moon's (forum operator's) explanation of the current situation.

Liz Fong-Jones has entered the fourth year of his attempts to shut down the Kiwi Farms. He has built a relationship with a progressive law firm and they have revealed their long-term plan: to exploit the DMCA process. The DMCA process requires that posts come down first, then the user who posted it must dox themselves and risk being sued and harassed, or keep that post down forever. Having failed to subvert this website technologically and financially, he is now probing legalistic avenues.

Anonymity is a constitutional right. Free speech is a God-given right. Copyright punches holes in both, which is why he is exploiting it. The only way for the site to stay up with this line of attack is for the Kiwi Farms to directly respond to copyright complaints where we think we are in the right. This means dealing with threats of litigation more often than any other business would.

Some complacent people believe that because the Kiwi Farms has always persisted that it will always persist. That because we have already endured so much, that we will be able to endure anything, and we will continue to exist regardless of the threat, and regardless of what action these complacent people take or do not take.

This is a way to rationalize doing nothing. Doing nothing will kill the site, and it will endanger all other websites that seek to let anonymous people criticize powerful people. Censoring the Kiwi Farms is a proof-of-concept they will deploy on any smaller site with much greater ease. Killing this forum was supposed to springboard his reputation management company, Tallpoppy, which is now defunct, but could yet be saved by bringing us down now. This is a profit-driven attack.

Every user on this forum should understand that my means are not limitless. The crafty solutions I have put in place in the last half decade of sparring with dangerous people has come at a cost. Our monthly expenses grow proportionally to the size and severity of our threats. Dealing with #DropKiwiFarms meant opening expensive VPSs around the world. To keep registrations open after our most recent problem in November cost me hundreds of work hours and hundreds of dollars of new expenses just for security services. The burden is adding up, and it leaves no space for improving the site or preparing for legal problems.

Three years ago I crowdfunded approximately $125,000 into a trust for dealing with litigation. Of that amount, the lower end of five figures remains, representing an annual legal expense of over $25,000 a year. A lot of it was spent in Australia saving us from a foreign court order that would have assisted Fong-Jones’s deplatforming campaign. Stopping this court order stopped #EndKiwiFarms in its tracks, but as long as the Kiwi Farms keeps records of his “Consent Accident”, he will never lose his sadistic motivation to try and dominate us.

We need money to move forward.

It is necessary that we reach our fundraising goal. I need 600 people to contribute $20 a month to keep the site alive. We are almost 75% there, but we need to meet it. In reality, this goal is the low end of what we actually need.

The site is running well and technology-wise we've never seen better days, which unfortunately belies the binary outcome of this peril: if he wins a copyright dispute, the site is gone. There is no path forward if critical commentary stops being protected as Fair Use. Giving him an inch now is miles lost in the immediate future. If we avoid the costs of litigation by yielding to bullshit copyright claims, we lose all of our archives. If we fail to litigate effectively, the LLC goes bankrupt and he will probably try and seize our hardware. Therefore, the only real option is apparent: we must be completely triumphant in court.

[DONATION SOLICITATION AND HOW TO GIVE DETAILS]

If the goal is not met I will close this forum by the end of the year. I have to be able to bear the costs of litigation. I cannot stick my neck out for thousands of anonymous people and handle legal complaints for a forum of hundreds of thousands of users who won't support me in doing so. I understand that acquiring cryptocurrency and sending checks is cumbersome, but it is necessary.

As long as you guys believe that I can run this carnival I will be your ringmaster. If nothing else, you’re buying a ticket to the show. If we’re lucky, in the process, we might set precedent that improves the Internet for everyone.

Fong-Jones purports that Kiwi Farms users infringed his copyright by posting (1) a screenshot of a BlueSky post, (2) an edited version of his professional headshot.

In the first instance, there is no copyright to claim. The screenshot is a derivative work and he does not own it.

In the second, the use is blatantly fair by existing case law precedent. It is a photo with zero economic value that is targeted with specific precise criticism directly into the image, a derivative work which critiques the subject with ridicule and mockery. There is no better case for a fair use.

In ordinary procedure with the DMCA, which is what Fong-Jones wanted, the offending images would be immediately deleted. The author would be notified and given the opportunity to dox himself and be sued and harassed by Fong-Jones for the rest of his life, as he has done with other users of the forum who were not able to preserve their anonymity.

We are, of course, not ordinary, and my dedication to permitting open discussion on this website is endless. With the alternatives being to let LFJ either outright censor the Kiwi Farms at will, or subject my userbase to what he has subjected me to for four years, the only righteous answer is to handle it directly.

In response to this, his lawyers immediately offered a settlement with terms of post censorship, $15.000 attorney's fees, and mediation. The offer was blatantly extortionate but the offer of mediation (a pre-settlement conference as a post-settlement condition) was strange.

Out of goodwill we offered to proceed to mediation to see if there were ways to avoid litigation. To even commence mediation, KUSK demanded a confidentiality agreement, which would apply to me as a person in perpetuity for all time, with LFJ being owed $100,000 in damages if I ever disclosed mediation took place or even hinted that such a confidentiality agreement existed.

I have 50,000 posts on this website and I do a 3+ hour long podcast about the website each week. The possibility of me somehow violating this would approach infinity each day, and he would monitor everything I said forever hoping that one day he could sue me for it.

Obviously such mediation was never offered by Fong-Jones or KUSK in goodwill and he threatened imminent litigation if we did not cede all demands to him by 5pm today.

We had two options: (1) Let LFJ continue to extort us for tens of thousands of dollars and attempt to dox my users and censor my website, (2) Sue.

What we have sued for is called a Declaratory Judgment. When someone threatens you with litigation, you can actually force their hand. This can be advantageous to do for many reasons I am not commenting on. The decision is already made, we're suing Liz Fong-Jones to seek a Declaratory Judgment that his copyright complaints are false, and for attorney's fees.

If the legal fundraiser goes very well, we have some time to amend our complaint to include more extensive complaints regarding #EndKiwiFarms.

If you're new to this situation and have never heard of Kiwi Farms, be advised that Wikipedia is not a reliable source on this one. Also be advised that this not a nice forum (putting it lightly), but it is a legal one under US law. Anyone who cares about a free internet should be keeping an eye out here.