I’m not going to lie: I read through this entire piece from THR about the current state of that lawsuit against Chad Hurley for leaking Kim Kardashian and Kanye West‘s proposal video, and … man, that is just an impenetrable wall of text. If you ever wondered why people spend so much time in law school, it’s because they’re essentially learning an entirely new language. Anyway, as best as I can tell, Hurley’s current case is that TMZ allegedly got more publicity out of the leak than he did, so they should be going after them instead. Which, kind of makes sense? Or no sense? Seriously, the law is a convoluted Gordian Knot designed to confuse the masses and I don’t like it.
The fact that most people probably came to the video on TMZ rather than Mixbit could be of significance. Even the lawyers for Kardashian are said to have come across the video through TMZ, initially believing that it was sourced back to Hurley. “But the video appearing on TMZ‘s website is not a link to MixBit’s post,” Hurley’s attorneys say. “Rather than using an embed of MixBit’s post, which would give MixBit control to remove the link, TMZ removed MixBit branding from the video, added its own branding and exported the video to its own player. Thus, not only did TMZ make it beyond Defendants’ control to remove, but they eliminated any alleged benefit MixBit would have received, even under Plaintiffs’ theory.”
So, that sort of makes sense I guess? I mean, maybe not. I don’t know. For all I know, all court decisions are made by releasing a herd of lemmings into a giant pinball machine and seeing how many make it to the other side. If the majority of them survive, the plaintiff wins. If not, the defendant wins. And if the lemmings find a way to escape, the Senate is replaced with lemmings, and everyone bows to the new Lemming Senate. Can you tell I’m not a lawyer?