PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Claiming he “knowingly, willfully, and deliberately” stole their copyrighted videos for his own use, 2 photojournalists filed a federal lawsuit against right-wing blogger Andy Ngo.
Journalists Grace Morgan and Melissa Lewis filed the lawsuit in US District Court in Portland on December 8. Morgan and Lewis claim Ngo repeatedly posted their videos covering the Black Lives Matter and civil protests in Portland on his social media accounts.
They blocked him from following their Twitter accounts, but claim Ngo continues to upload and post their videos on his Twitter feed.
Morgan and Lewis said because they are considered “left-wing” journalists, they are “deluged with harassing comments from” Ngo’s followers. They point out that Ngo is not merely retweeting their content
“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,” the lawsuit states.
Read the entire lawsuit below
Both Morgan and Lewis claim they never gave Ngo “permission or consent” to post their video content.
“In fact, because Morgan and Lewis have blocked (Ngo) from viewing their Twitter feeds, he knew that he did not have permission to copy and upload their videos to his own Twitter account,” the lawsuit states.
The federal suit centers on 4 specific videos, 2 from each photojournalist on October 1 and October 2, 2021.
Ngo, the suit claims, refused to take down their videos. So they sued for copyright infringement.
No dollar amount is expressly noted in this lawsuit, but Morgan and Lewis want “all profits attributable to the infringement including, limited to, all of (Ngo)’s revenues from exploitation of the Videos.”
They also reserve the right to elect statutory or actual damages, the suit states.
KOIN 6 News will continue to follow this story.