A new lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York offers a clean example of something that keeps happening and keeps getting ignored: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used to censor speech and unmask anonymous speakers.
The case is Lolcow LLC v. Fong-Jones, filed on March 12, 2026, and it pits the operator of the web forum Kiwi Farms against Liz Fong-Jones, an activist and field Chief Technology Officer at SaaS observability platform Honeycomb, who has been filing DMCA subpoenas in an attempt to identify anonymous forum users.
The content Fong-Jones wants censored is a screenshot of a Fong-Jones Bluesky post and an edited version of a Fong-Jones headshot, both related to what Fong-Jones has previously described publicly as a “consent accident.”
Forum users posted and discussed those images. Fong-Jones responded by claiming copyright ownership and filing DMCA subpoenas to force the site to hand over the identities of the people who posted them.
The copyright claims seem thin. Kiwi Farms operator Joshua Moon argues that the screenshot is a derivative work over which Fong-Jones holds no copyright, and that the edited headshot represents a textbook case of fair use, given that the image has no commercial value and was modified specifically for purposes of criticism and commentary.
That argument carries weight. Courts have long recognized that transformative use of images for commentary or ridicule sits comfortably within fair use protections.
What makes this case useful as a case study is less the copyright question itself and more the mechanism being exploited. The DMCA subpoena process, codified in Section 512(h), allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous internet users just by asking a court clerk to issue one and attaching a copy of the infringement notice.
Hellbound and Down 