The company behind Twitch, the Amazon-owned online video game streaming service, has filed a lawsuit against unidentified online trolls who last month flooded Twitch.tv with pornography and violent images—including bodycam footage from the shooter at the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques where 51 people were killed in March.

Lawyers for San Francisco-based Twitch Interactive Inc. at Perkins Coie sued the John Doe defendants in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on June 14 bringing claims of trademark infringement and breach of contract as well as claims of trespass and common-law fraud under California law.

Annemarie Bridy, a professor of law at the University of Idaho and an affiliated scholar with The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said the lawsuit sends “a strong message to would-be trolls that they're not operating in a liability-free zone.” She said that the surrounding publicity drummed up by the lawsuit could have a further deterrent effect.

According to the complaint, the unnamed defendants called themselves “Artifact Streams” and used third-party sites including Google, Discord and Weebly to coordinate their efforts to co-opt the directory for the digital collectible card game Artifact. The complaint claims that beginning around May 25, the John Doe defendants began to broadcast prohibited content, including pornographic, racist and misogynistic videos, copyrighted movies and television shows, and violent videos including footage from the March 2019 Christchurch attacks. The suit claims the defendants used automated bots to generate additional views and promote the videos so the videos would be promoted to additional users. In the wake of the influx of unwanted content, Twitch eventually suspended streaming for new accounts and installed two-factor authentication.

“Twitch expended significant resources combatting defendants' attack,” wrote the company's lawyers at Perkins Coie. The company, they wrote, “spent time and money researching and taking technological action against defendants, responded to press inquiries, and hired legal counsel.”

The suit claims that the Doe defendants used Twitch's trademarked logos in promoting their campaign, used automated “bots” in violations of the site's terms of service, and posted material that was also prohibited. Twitch is asking for restitution and unspecified damages. Perkins Coie's Katherine Dugdale and Holly Simpkins didn't respond to email messages Monday.

Bridy, whose research has focused on the impact that new technologies have on existing legal frameworks, said that she thinks “each of the claims in the suit has legs.” On the trademark claim, in particular, she said that users who ran across Twitch's marks on the internet in connection with the defendants' actions could be confused about the company's involvement. “Any association of Twitch's trademarks with violence, terrorism, pornography, and hate is obviously damaging to Twitch's brand,” she said.

The lawsuit itself, she noted, would give Twitch the power to subpoena internet service providers for information that could be used to identify people behind the troll accounts.

“Depending on how sophisticated the trolls are, the effort to identify them through the IP addresses from which the content was posted may hit a dead end,” she said. “And there's always the chance that the trolls are located outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.” The subpoenas themselves, Bridy said, will help the company figure all that out.

Read the complaint: