On Free Men and Freeman
October 3, 2023
In VanDerStok v. Garland, No. 4:22-cv-691 (N.D. Tex.) and No. 23-10718 (5th Cir.), the Fifth Circuit confirmed Defense Distributed and Blackhawk Manufacturing are now the only two companies in the country who can legally sell printable gun build kits and build kits containing receivers and fixtures.
Remember: though this case was billed in the media as being about 80% receivers, it was actually about ATF illegally squeezing every combination of unregulated parts into the meaning of the word “firearm.” Many in our industry gave up creating and selling build kits after the last two of years of this mess. But, unless the ATF can get *another* emergency Supreme Court order, partially complete build kits will survive until the Fifth Circuit rules on the legality of Biden’s ATF2021-R05F. The “F” now stands for FUBAR.
In Defense Distributed v. Platkin, No. 3:21-cv-09867-MAS-TJB (D. NJ.), which will always live in my heart as Defense Distributed v. Grewal, the district court has dismissed the case after five years of high stakes procedural games and a demand from the Fifth Circuit that the case be returned to Texas. I wonder why. Oh yeah, because this is the case that will decide whether CAD files have First Amendment protections. Perhaps a Third Circuit panel will actually do their job when we appeal.
Finally, the judge in Everytown v. DEFCAD, No. 1:21-cv-08704-PGG-RWL (S.D. N.Y.) denied the last motion to dismiss and ordered Freeman1337 to identify himself to the court and to Everytown tomorrow. The court further ordered that Freeman show up in person at a hearing on October 11 in New York. This is ironic.
I’ll say a few things about this case now.
I organized the attorneys, the common defense agreement and financing for this case back in 2021. The co-defendants and I had separate counsel and understood our common purpose was to fight Everytown’s efforts to tie CAD files to the law of trademark infringement (and thereby establish a new mode of threatening CAD developers and polluting 1A protections).
The first surprises in this case were that the judge was *very* hostile to 3D guns, and would not allow the co-defendants to litigate the court’s jurisdiction anonymously. He even ordered expedited discovery from non-parties to the case, including Odysee and Twitter. To our dismay, Odysee provided all the goods they had on the co-defendants, including identifying every Gatalog Odysee account and their relevant communications with Gatalog members and representatives. Odysee did this without any kind of fight, and ignored our requests to at least wait while we appealed to the Second Circuit. Even Twitter would object and eventually join our effort to produce discovery under a protective order.
The declaration of Erin Galloway of Everytown, below, is a decent summary of the goods they got during expedited discovery. Feel free to download it and learn something.
Once we had appealed (and failed) more than once to the Second Circuit to fight the judge’s hostile orders, we began to prepare interrogatories and bunker down for a discovery fight with Everytown. Freeman at this point showed his cowardice and abandoned all contact with his attorney from fear of eventually being identified. I guess no one told him lawsuits don’t always go the way you want.
The story has since evolved that mean old DEFCAD doxxed poor Freeman, but the record, finally unsealed, shows otherwise:
Freeman assured us well before litigation that his email and Signal number (acquired outside of DEFCAD) were insufficient to identify him, and he agreed to join our lawsuit, which quickly became about the very right to litigate anonymously. A fight worth having in New York and the Second Circuit. Even after Freeman shit himself and abandoned his post, and even after all his howling that DEFCAD is a honeypot, I paid for his attorney and appeals for another year. These are the last words addressed to Freeman from the Second Circuit.
Meanwhile, at the very same time, Freeman was out self-soothing on Reddit. He bragged about settling out of the case and lying to his attorney and a federal judge to feather his Twitter profile, which is his only real product.
I have trouble imagining being such an absolute, post-literate prole. Is it possible to forget that you’re involved in a federal case? What magical thinking got him there? The mere assurance of his “attorney” at the Gatalog? I include so many pictures in this post because so many of you share Freeman’s disease.
So now, because he cannot shut up about how private he is in public, Freeman is stuck and alone in the Everytown case, and Everytown will press their advantage. The sanctions they want are a final judgment (which will produce bad law related to CAD and trademark, as well as the right to litigate anonymously in NY), and an injunction against Freeman, which, because he is a coward, he will almost certainly obey anyway. So why did he fight at all?
Some advice: If you fight, you should not be a coward. And if you are a coward, you should not fight.
Freeman allowed his “friends”, who know he’s suggestible and suffers from a personality disorder, to convince him this case was about him. But the case was truly about the profile politics of the Gatalog. After a couple of years of fighting the case, I came to understand that the Gatalog’s only interests were in hiding the facts that they were 1) a corporation owned by three dudes in Florida, 2) that they censored and read the private messages of users in their Rocketchat, and 3) that their relationship with Odysee was completely unprotected. Is this not public knowledge by now? Is this not the story of the origin of AWCY? Was this worth scuttling an important question of law in enemy territory?
The second generation of 3D gun printers largely succumbed to the mere presentation of practical politics. It is enough for them to ape the slogans on Twitter. To play struggle before the general peer of social media with empty rhetorical positions and pique. To administer the surplus enjoyment of the pure “process” of engineering and releasing open source files, without doing either of these.
I discussed some of this at a recent speech in Prague. And I’ll likely do so again. Fighting gun control will eventually require you to fight gun control, dear hearts.
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