May 9, 2025 • 16 mins
Impersonation and theft of work (like intellectual property or creative content) can raise several legal issues. Here’s a concise overview:Copyright Infringement: If someone copies or distributes your original work (e.g., art, writing, music) without permission, they may violate copyright law. You can pursue legal action to stop the infringement and seek damages. Registering your work with a copyright office strengthens your case.Trademark Infringement: If someone impersonates you by using your brand name, logo, or other identifiers, they may infringe on your trademark. This is common in cases of fake accounts or businesses mimicking your identity. You can file a lawsuit or request removal of infringing content.Identity Theft/Misrepresentation: Impersonating you online or elsewhere to deceive others (e.g., creating fake social media profiles) may violate laws like identity theft or fraud, depending on jurisdiction. This can also lead to civil claims for defamation if false statements harm your reputation.Plagiarism: While not always a legal issue, plagiarism can breach ethical standards and lead to lawsuits if it involves copyrighted material or causes financial harm. Some jurisdictions allow claims for "passing off" if someone misrepresents your work as their own.Cybercrime Laws: Impersonation via hacking, phishing, or fake accounts may fall under cybercrime laws (e.g., the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). Victims can report to law enforcement or platforms like X for account suspension.Right of Publicity: If someone uses your name, likeness, or identity for commercial gain without consent, they may violate your right of publicity (in jurisdictions recognizing this right, like many U.S. states).
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:12):
I watch you from the shadows where the street lights fade.
Your laughter's like a melody, asong I've never played.
Your name's carved in my mind, though you don't know it's
there. I'm just a ghost in your world,
breathing your air Every step you take.
(00:34):
I'm tracing in my head, buildingworlds where you love me, Though
I've never said you're my secret, my obsession, my
unspoken vow. I'm alive in this dream, but you
don't know me now. You're the star of my story, but
(00:55):
I'm not in your scene. I'm the shadow in the corner,
living in a dream. Every smile you give, I steal it
for my heart. You don't know I exist, but
we're never apart. The coffee shop at night.
(01:23):
I know your order well. The way you tuck your hair back.
It's a tale I'll never tell. I've built a life for us in a
place you'll never see. A castle in my mind where you
belong to me. Every glance you throw, I catch
(01:44):
it like a spark. It was the fire inside me,
burning through the dark. I'm the stranger you'll never
meet, But I'm always near writing love you'll never read
in a heart you'll never hear. You're the star of my story.
But I'm not in your scene. I'm the shadow.
(02:09):
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Brett Keene and you
are watching and listening to GOD TV Radio.
I hope you're all having a blessed day out there.
Don't forget to check out the video I put up earlier.
And also don't forget that we'redoing a live show tonight at
7:00 PM Everybody's invited. The link is in the description
(02:29):
of the live show for you to be able to come in.
And if you need a reminder, justgo to my front of my page and
click notify on the live show and go from there.
If you can't find it with all the videos I have on the front
of my page, just click on the live tab and it'll be right
there in the podcast section. Very easy, very easy to do.
(02:53):
And also, when you get an opportunity, check out my new
album as well as the release of my book and my new website.
Let me know what you all think about that.
You can actually listen to my music for free on that or
Spotify or Amazon Music or the website itself.
There you go. There's Acds that are available
(03:16):
as well as digital downloads if you're interested.
So my friends, a lot of you are on social media, even those who
are associated with me. I didn't keep much contact with
you whenever I went away from YouTube for a while, taking my
break, as many of you probably notice, what I did during that
(03:36):
time was I spent time actually constructing new music and also
doing some new writings and all that, but I also had something
else come up. It's something I did not expect
to actually ever do. It is something that I said that
I'd like to do on video. It's something that I said I was
(03:56):
interested in doing, but I nevergot around to actually doing it.
And to be honest with you, I never thought anybody would
listen or anyone would care about what goes on on the
Internet. I was convinced that pretty much
people can get away with murder on this thing and and nothing
(04:16):
would ever get done. The law didn't care.
Especially with the experiences I've had with police around my
little country town, I didn't assume that I was going to find
Kojak or Dick Tracy or some kindof super detective or lawyers
that were ever going to do anything for me.
But while I was trying to work with musicians and work with
(04:39):
people, my brother, he has repeatedly told me that he's
sick and tired of whenever people type in his name, that
there are people who, because they have an issue with me, they
attacked him. And he also says, Brett, have
you looked at the releases on your books?
And I said, what's going on? I, I don't always, you know,
(05:03):
daily look into what's happeningor what's being released
alongside me or, you know, is there something that's going to
be put by me musically and all this kind of stuff?
But apparently what had happenedwas there was an atheist out
there. And I know for a fact this was
an atheist who did this, decidedto release their own music, and
(05:29):
apparently the songs were all about me, had my name in them,
had imagery in the booklets, andalso used a lot of my logos and
my trademark stuff. So right then and there I'm
like, well that's ignorant as hell.
The person also wrote some kind of book themselves where they, I
(05:51):
guess, spent a great deal of time just attacking the hell out
of me. But not only that, but they had
created an entire YouTube channel based upon me.
But to make matters worse, not only were they stealing my
images and stealing my videos, but apparently they also were
impersonating me, pretending to be me.
(06:12):
They actually put that they wereBrett Keene and GOD TV Radio and
all this. Now, although my brother
complained and it was a sad, sad, terrible thing for somebody
to be doing to me, I still wasn't convinced there was
really anything to do about it. You know, that's just my thought
process. I think a lot of Youtubers out
(06:33):
there, you probably feel the same way.
Well, my brother ended up talking to some people and these
people get a hold of me and say,hey man, I know a lawyer that
you can talk to who will take this seriously and all this.
So I figured, OK, what the hell,I'll go ahead and do that.
Well, the lawyer ends up having a conversation with me.
(06:57):
The appointment was made. I go in, I set, I explain the
issues and the struggles. The people involved who got me
in touch with this person, they already gave a bunch of
information themselves. So they said, look, we have to
prove that you know, this is your trademark, these are your
(07:18):
images, this is your music, yourlikeness and all that.
Luckily for me, the person put my face all over everything.
They put realistic pictures and then they put cartoon images and
all that. And it was damn clear that they
were using all my stuff. And you could tell from the
(07:39):
music. And also he said that it has to
prove that he this, this atheistdid some intellectual rights and
issues and all that. I've got a list of some of the
things that this person was hit with.
It was pretty rough. The person also claimed that I
(07:59):
was a plagiarist. They claimed that I was a
domestic abuser. They basically said everything
they possibly could, from claiming I was a pedophile to
you name it. Whatever.
The worst thing is you can thinkof this person put out there on
the Internet to try to aggravateand cause trouble.
(08:22):
Well, so now there had to be this thing was their accusations
and their nonsense. Did it hurt me in some kind of
way financially? Did it hurt my reputation any?
Well before the lawyer, all he had to do was basically
associate all the different videos and crap having to do
(08:45):
with the same thing and also thepeople who are making comments
showing that it indicated that they were convinced that what
they were hearing was true. By doing so.
This showed that the person was having an impact on the minds
and thoughts of others and that it was causing them to have a
(09:05):
warped and twisted view of how Iactually am in real life because
the person was pretending to be me with all this nonsense and
all that. This person made a book with
cartoon animations where they represented me as whipping my
(09:25):
wife and my children. OK, pretty rough.
Pretty rough stuff. So the lawyer said that he would
get this going, and I thought itwas going to take an extremely
long time. I thought that it was going to
be like television where, you know, courts go on and on and on
forever and ever and ever. But it didn't eventually ended
(09:48):
up going and the lawyers ended up coming through with something
called settlement where the person didn't want to go
completely to trial and they hadto pay out the ass.
And yes, I've already received the money and, and all that.
And you know, the person got punished for what they did.
(10:09):
I'm not going to go into all thedetails and everything, but it
was, it was not a fun experience.
I remember thinking in the past when people annoyed me how nice
it would be to to go to court and take somebody out.
I know a bunch of my buddies outthere who've had some of the
same kind of things happen to them.
(10:29):
They fantasize about that kind of stuff, but not me.
I didn't enjoy it. I don't like sitting in the a
cold courtroom seeing a bunch ofpeople, you know, who can
basically destroy your life in amatter of seconds, you know,
through their decisions and analysts and such like that.
(10:50):
So it was like, well, this is this is rough, but it actually
went through quite quickly. The case was simple.
It showed that the person did this for their own personal
reasons. They hated me.
They hated my faith. They not only insisted on trying
(11:13):
to destroy my life, but they constantly talked about
Christianity, saying that, you know, Christians are pieces of
shit and you know, their God is a rapist and all this kind of
stuff. So it wasn't really difficult to
make a case on the person. They, the person, pretty much
tied the noose around their own neck on that issue.
(11:35):
But it's scary, folks. If you decide that you want to
pursue a career on YouTube or social media, there's people out
there for whatever justification.
They don't even have to know you.
They don't even have to have ever had a conversation with you
in their life, and they will go out of their way to destroy you.
(11:58):
For whatever reason, your face becomes the target.
I don't know if the person suffered from mental illness, I
don't know if the person was psycho or someone who looked
like me used to beat them up whenever they were in school or
something whenever the child. I don't know.
Things like that weren't important to the judge.
(12:18):
Judge wasn't interested in justifications or excuses or
anything like that. All they wanted was the facts,
the information laid out. I provided the stuff, the lawyer
provided what he explored and discovered and and that was
that. And it was a, it was a decent
chunk of money and the person was forced to remove all the
(12:43):
products and all the things thatthey'd put up.
And YouTube was also forced to remove their YouTube channel
over it and that was the end of that person.
And the person had a fairly goodfollowing too.
I don't know why so many people enjoy channels like that, but
they seem to be picking up steam.
(13:05):
I apparently wasn't the only one.
Even though most of the videos were about me, most of the
channel seemed completely directed at me.
But there were other Christians too, who this person maliciously
attacked. It was this, it was disgusting.
(13:26):
It was very, very gross type of content.
So they're gone now and all thatnonsense they put out there,
It's gone. This person also because of all
the time and effort they put into trying to screw with me,
they're pages went all over the Internet.
(13:50):
You couldn't type my name in without also finding them right
next to me on everything. But there's books, music, my
art, everything because they were pretending to be me.
Terrifying. Terrifying.
So yeah, well, it's, it's finished now.
(14:12):
It's it's done, so I go about myway, but it still affects me.
I never in all of my life thought that I was going to have
to be involved in something likethat.
I guess I never really seen a reason.
I always thought rationally and logically, why would someone
(14:33):
want to try to do that to me? You know, there's a lot of worse
people out in the world. There's people who've killed,
there's people who raped, there's people who have actually
hurt their spouses, women hurting men, men hurting women,
people killing their own kids, kids killing their own parents,
school shootings, you name it. But me out of all the, you know,
(14:56):
dirty, rotten bastards in the world to go after this person
decided that I was worthy of their life's obsession or
ambitions, I don't know. But it is what it is.
And we've been considering focusing on some other people
who are doing some things that are similar to that.
(15:20):
So if you start well, I I will most likely discuss it more on
the radio. Some of the other people that
may end up finding themselves inthe same position.
I don't want to get too far intoit.
According to the lawyer, you're not supposed to give out too
much information and all that. But since this is over with this
(15:43):
other person, I can talk about it somewhat freely than the
issue. This wasn't some kind of
settlement where you're gagged or told you can't talk about it.
I just can't tell you the real name and all that kind of stuff
because that would be considereddoxing and all that.
And besides, I think the person was punished enough.
(16:03):
I, I don't want to see the Internet go after somebody in
some kind of ruthless way. Well, that is it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you all have a wonderful
day. God bless.
(16:27):
I watch you from the shadows where the street lights fade.
Your laughter is like a melody.
I watch you from the shadows where the street lights fade.
Your laughter's like a melody, asong I've never played.
Your name's carved in my mind, though you don't know it's
there. I'm just a ghost in your world,
breathing your air Every step you take.
(00:34):
I'm tracing in my head, buildingworlds where you love me, Though
I've never said you're my secret, my obsession, my
unspoken vow. I'm alive in this dream, but you
don't know me now. You're the star of my story, but
(00:55):
I'm not in your scene. I'm the shadow in the corner,
living in a dream. Every smile you give, I steal it
for my heart. You don't know I exist, but
we're never apart. The coffee shop at night.
(01:23):
I know your order well. The way you tuck your hair back.
It's a tale I'll never tell. I've built a life for us in a
place you'll never see. A castle in my mind where you
belong to me. Every glance you throw, I catch
(01:44):
it like a spark. It was the fire inside me,
burning through the dark. I'm the stranger you'll never
meet, But I'm always near writing love you'll never read
in a heart you'll never hear. You're the star of my story.
But I'm not in your scene. I'm the shadow.
(02:09):
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Brett Keene and you
are watching and listening to GOD TV Radio.
I hope you're all having a blessed day out there.
Don't forget to check out the video I put up earlier.
And also don't forget that we'redoing a live show tonight at
7:00 PM Everybody's invited. The link is in the description
(02:29):
of the live show for you to be able to come in.
And if you need a reminder, justgo to my front of my page and
click notify on the live show and go from there.
If you can't find it with all the videos I have on the front
of my page, just click on the live tab and it'll be right
there in the podcast section. Very easy, very easy to do.
(02:53):
And also, when you get an opportunity, check out my new
album as well as the release of my book and my new website.
Let me know what you all think about that.
You can actually listen to my music for free on that or
Spotify or Amazon Music or the website itself.
There you go. There's Acds that are available
(03:16):
as well as digital downloads if you're interested.
So my friends, a lot of you are on social media, even those who
are associated with me. I didn't keep much contact with
you whenever I went away from YouTube for a while, taking my
break, as many of you probably notice, what I did during that
(03:36):
time was I spent time actually constructing new music and also
doing some new writings and all that, but I also had something
else come up. It's something I did not expect
to actually ever do. It is something that I said that
I'd like to do on video. It's something that I said I was
(03:56):
interested in doing, but I nevergot around to actually doing it.
And to be honest with you, I never thought anybody would
listen or anyone would care about what goes on on the
Internet. I was convinced that pretty much
people can get away with murder on this thing and and nothing
(04:16):
would ever get done. The law didn't care.
Especially with the experiences I've had with police around my
little country town, I didn't assume that I was going to find
Kojak or Dick Tracy or some kindof super detective or lawyers
that were ever going to do anything for me.
But while I was trying to work with musicians and work with
(04:39):
people, my brother, he has repeatedly told me that he's
sick and tired of whenever people type in his name, that
there are people who, because they have an issue with me, they
attacked him. And he also says, Brett, have
you looked at the releases on your books?
And I said, what's going on? I, I don't always, you know,
(05:03):
daily look into what's happeningor what's being released
alongside me or, you know, is there something that's going to
be put by me musically and all this kind of stuff?
But apparently what had happenedwas there was an atheist out
there. And I know for a fact this was
an atheist who did this, decidedto release their own music, and
(05:29):
apparently the songs were all about me, had my name in them,
had imagery in the booklets, andalso used a lot of my logos and
my trademark stuff. So right then and there I'm
like, well that's ignorant as hell.
The person also wrote some kind of book themselves where they, I
(05:51):
guess, spent a great deal of time just attacking the hell out
of me. But not only that, but they had
created an entire YouTube channel based upon me.
But to make matters worse, not only were they stealing my
images and stealing my videos, but apparently they also were
impersonating me, pretending to be me.
(06:12):
They actually put that they wereBrett Keene and GOD TV Radio and
all this. Now, although my brother
complained and it was a sad, sad, terrible thing for somebody
to be doing to me, I still wasn't convinced there was
really anything to do about it. You know, that's just my thought
process. I think a lot of Youtubers out
(06:33):
there, you probably feel the same way.
Well, my brother ended up talking to some people and these
people get a hold of me and say,hey man, I know a lawyer that
you can talk to who will take this seriously and all this.
So I figured, OK, what the hell,I'll go ahead and do that.
Well, the lawyer ends up having a conversation with me.
(06:57):
The appointment was made. I go in, I set, I explain the
issues and the struggles. The people involved who got me
in touch with this person, they already gave a bunch of
information themselves. So they said, look, we have to
prove that you know, this is your trademark, these are your
(07:18):
images, this is your music, yourlikeness and all that.
Luckily for me, the person put my face all over everything.
They put realistic pictures and then they put cartoon images and
all that. And it was damn clear that they
were using all my stuff. And you could tell from the
(07:39):
music. And also he said that it has to
prove that he this, this atheistdid some intellectual rights and
issues and all that. I've got a list of some of the
things that this person was hit with.
It was pretty rough. The person also claimed that I
(07:59):
was a plagiarist. They claimed that I was a
domestic abuser. They basically said everything
they possibly could, from claiming I was a pedophile to
you name it. Whatever.
The worst thing is you can thinkof this person put out there on
the Internet to try to aggravateand cause trouble.
(08:22):
Well, so now there had to be this thing was their accusations
and their nonsense. Did it hurt me in some kind of
way financially? Did it hurt my reputation any?
Well before the lawyer, all he had to do was basically
associate all the different videos and crap having to do
(08:45):
with the same thing and also thepeople who are making comments
showing that it indicated that they were convinced that what
they were hearing was true. By doing so.
This showed that the person was having an impact on the minds
and thoughts of others and that it was causing them to have a
(09:05):
warped and twisted view of how Iactually am in real life because
the person was pretending to be me with all this nonsense and
all that. This person made a book with
cartoon animations where they represented me as whipping my
(09:25):
wife and my children. OK, pretty rough.
Pretty rough stuff. So the lawyer said that he would
get this going, and I thought itwas going to take an extremely
long time. I thought that it was going to
be like television where, you know, courts go on and on and on
forever and ever and ever. But it didn't eventually ended
(09:48):
up going and the lawyers ended up coming through with something
called settlement where the person didn't want to go
completely to trial and they hadto pay out the ass.
And yes, I've already received the money and, and all that.
And you know, the person got punished for what they did.
(10:09):
I'm not going to go into all thedetails and everything, but it
was, it was not a fun experience.
I remember thinking in the past when people annoyed me how nice
it would be to to go to court and take somebody out.
I know a bunch of my buddies outthere who've had some of the
same kind of things happen to them.
(10:29):
They fantasize about that kind of stuff, but not me.
I didn't enjoy it. I don't like sitting in the a
cold courtroom seeing a bunch ofpeople, you know, who can
basically destroy your life in amatter of seconds, you know,
through their decisions and analysts and such like that.
(10:50):
So it was like, well, this is this is rough, but it actually
went through quite quickly. The case was simple.
It showed that the person did this for their own personal
reasons. They hated me.
They hated my faith. They not only insisted on trying
(11:13):
to destroy my life, but they constantly talked about
Christianity, saying that, you know, Christians are pieces of
shit and you know, their God is a rapist and all this kind of
stuff. So it wasn't really difficult to
make a case on the person. They, the person, pretty much
tied the noose around their own neck on that issue.
(11:35):
But it's scary, folks. If you decide that you want to
pursue a career on YouTube or social media, there's people out
there for whatever justification.
They don't even have to know you.
They don't even have to have ever had a conversation with you
in their life, and they will go out of their way to destroy you.
(11:58):
For whatever reason, your face becomes the target.
I don't know if the person suffered from mental illness, I
don't know if the person was psycho or someone who looked
like me used to beat them up whenever they were in school or
something whenever the child. I don't know.
Things like that weren't important to the judge.
(12:18):
Judge wasn't interested in justifications or excuses or
anything like that. All they wanted was the facts,
the information laid out. I provided the stuff, the lawyer
provided what he explored and discovered and and that was
that. And it was a, it was a decent
chunk of money and the person was forced to remove all the
(12:43):
products and all the things thatthey'd put up.
And YouTube was also forced to remove their YouTube channel
over it and that was the end of that person.
And the person had a fairly goodfollowing too.
I don't know why so many people enjoy channels like that, but
they seem to be picking up steam.
(13:05):
I apparently wasn't the only one.
Even though most of the videos were about me, most of the
channel seemed completely directed at me.
But there were other Christians too, who this person maliciously
attacked. It was this, it was disgusting.
(13:26):
It was very, very gross type of content.
So they're gone now and all thatnonsense they put out there,
It's gone. This person also because of all
the time and effort they put into trying to screw with me,
they're pages went all over the Internet.
(13:50):
You couldn't type my name in without also finding them right
next to me on everything. But there's books, music, my
art, everything because they were pretending to be me.
Terrifying. Terrifying.
So yeah, well, it's, it's finished now.
(14:12):
It's it's done, so I go about myway, but it still affects me.
I never in all of my life thought that I was going to have
to be involved in something likethat.
I guess I never really seen a reason.
I always thought rationally and logically, why would someone
(14:33):
want to try to do that to me? You know, there's a lot of worse
people out in the world. There's people who've killed,
there's people who raped, there's people who have actually
hurt their spouses, women hurting men, men hurting women,
people killing their own kids, kids killing their own parents,
school shootings, you name it. But me out of all the, you know,
(14:56):
dirty, rotten bastards in the world to go after this person
decided that I was worthy of their life's obsession or
ambitions, I don't know. But it is what it is.
And we've been considering focusing on some other people
who are doing some things that are similar to that.
(15:20):
So if you start well, I I will most likely discuss it more on
the radio. Some of the other people that
may end up finding themselves inthe same position.
I don't want to get too far intoit.
According to the lawyer, you're not supposed to give out too
much information and all that. But since this is over with this
(15:43):
other person, I can talk about it somewhat freely than the
issue. This wasn't some kind of
settlement where you're gagged or told you can't talk about it.
I just can't tell you the real name and all that kind of stuff
because that would be considereddoxing and all that.
And besides, I think the person was punished enough.
(16:03):
I, I don't want to see the Internet go after somebody in
some kind of ruthless way. Well, that is it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you all have a wonderful
day. God bless.
(16:27):
I watch you from the shadows where the street lights fade.
Your laughter is like a melody.
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