Streamers including Kai Cenat named in Drake's UMG lawsuit for their reaction videos instantly respond with reaction videos: 'The biggest Ls come from not knowing how to take an L'
Popular gaming-adjacent streamers including Kai Cenat And Mark Phillips have been named in musician Drake's defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG), which accuses the music publisher of spreading the «false and malicious» narrative he is a pedophile via the Kedrick Lamar track Not Like Us.
The Lamar song is a diss track, an established tradition in which rappers pop off on one another until the audience decides a winner or get bored, and is now probably the full stop on a long-running feud between the two artists. Drake had accused Lamar of domestic abuse on one of his tracks, before Lamar's Not Like Us described Drake and his entourage as «certified paedophiles» who need to be «registered.»
Drake's lawsuit takes aim at UMG and not Lamar himself, and claims that the publisher «chose corporate greed» by trying to create a «viral hit» out of the song when it knew the accusations against him were «not only false, but dangerous.» This is where the streamers come in.
Towards the end of the filing Drake's lawyers claim that UMG whitelisted Not Like Us from streaming services, «for the purpose of spreading the recording, and its defamatory content, as broadly as possible and as quickly as possible» (thanks, Kotaku). It says this is notable because, to Drake's knowledge, «UMG has a formal ban on whitelisting and had never before whitelisted a song on any platform,» but in this case it had a «massive and immediate effect» whereby «content creators rushed to republish the recording in 'reaction-videos.'»
The suit then lists examples: Kai Cenat (11.6 million YouTube subs) posted a video which has over 9 million views; Twitch streamer RDC Gaming posted a reaction with over 4.5 million views; The CartierFamily (1.44 million subs) have 2 million views on a reaction video; No Life Shaq (4.75 million subs) posted a 14.5-minute reaction clip with 5.3 million views; and Zias! (4.94 million subs) posted a 15-minute reaction video which has 6.6 million views.
The lawyers
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