Antifascist activists celebrated last week when a federal lawsuit was filed against Andy Ngo, a far-right Twitter star, by two video journalists who claim that Ngo violated copyright law by using video they shot during a protest in Portland, Oregon in his own tweets.

The copyright infringement complaint focused on a pair of tweets Ngo posted on October 2, in which he embedded video shot the night before by Grace Morgan, a freelance photographer, and Melissa Lewis, an activist and videographer. Ngo’s tweets used both Morgan’s video of a bonfire set by protesters in the street and Lewis’s video of a tense face-off with the police in their entirety, but replaced the original captions with his own text.

Morgan and Lewis say they sued Ngo because he has used their copyrighted videos in this way dozens of times, even after they asked him to stop and blocked him on Twitter.

But Ngo appears to have taken advantage of a technical short cut in the Twitter app that allows users to copy the source code for video clips embedded in other people’s tweets, and then paste that code into their own tweets. The result is that users like Ngo can send out tweets in which other people’s videos are embedded, but without the original captions, even from accounts that have blocked them.

The only sign that the video was taken from another account is a small line of type Twitter adds automatically, with the username of the original uploader and a link to their account.

For example, in July, Ngo used...

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