The Other Side of the Stream
VidStream: “This Tech Was Revolutionary and Widely Used”
On the opposing bench, Bradley Caldwell of Caldwell Cassady & Curry painted a starkly different picture. He told the jury that X began infringing in 2015, roughly a year before it closed down Vine, which had offered video-sharing functionality that VidStream says was strikingly similar to its patented process.
“While users may take this technology for granted now, it was groundbreaking at the time,” Caldwell said. “What Twitter has is primarily word games.”
VidStream is demanding $0.07 per user per month in damages — a metric that adds up to a staggering $632 million over the years the infringement allegedly took place.
According to VidStream, Youtoo’s founders were never compensated for their role in developing a method to distribute user-generated video clips — a feature now foundational to online platforms.
Musk’s Shadow in the Courtroom
Jury Asked to Separate Emotions from Evidence
Martens also made a strategic appeal to the jury: don’t let opinions about Elon Musk cloud the facts. The events at issue, he stressed, predate Musk’s acquisition of X by years. “This is not a referendum on Mr. Musk,” he said.
As the trial dives into the technical depths of how digital clips are processed and shared, the courtroom battle threatens to become a defining case in the growing universe of social media intellectual property disputes.
