This Lock Company Tried Suing a Guy for Picking Its Lock. It Backfired.

Florida-based lockmaker Proven Industries posted a video online bragging that its $130 trailer lock could survive anything. YouTuber and former Marine Trevor McNally took up that challenge. Breaking supposedly unbreakable locks is his entire thing. That’s his YouTube bread and butter.

So, of course, he was able to effortlessly break Proven’s “unbreakable” lock with a strip of aluminum peeled off a can of Liquid Death, the seltzer water with the preposterously hardcore branding. He did all that just after he finished off a juice box. That seems like a random, totally inconsequential fact to mention, but it will be important later.

Anyway, Proven Industries sued him. It didn’t turn out so well for them.

Lock Company Tried to Sue the Guy Who Picked Its Lock. It Didn’t Go Well.

Ars Technica reports that Proven’s owner, Ron Lee, slid into McNally’s DMs with a cryptic “be prepared!” message. Then he texted McNally’s wife by “mistake,” assuming the number belonged to McNally himself. The text, paired with the ominous “be prepared!” DM didn’t sit well with McNally, especially after he found out that Lee was a three-time felon.

Lee promptly went into full social media meltdown mode. He posted indirect threats promising that he was about to get “really personal” with McNally. Lee started arguing with a variety of random people on social media. At the same time, one unnamed Proven employee thought they had really struck a chord when they said that too many people were taking everything they saw online “for face value,” which, to the furious Proven poster, made the internet randos sound “like a bunch of liberals lol.” Ah. Now we see what we’re dealing with here.

In May, Proven filed an eight-count federal complaint accusing McNally of defamation, copyright infringement, and “false advertising.” Their filings repeatedly mentioned his juice box, arguing that his “childlike leg-swinging” made their product seem laughable. The irony of it all is that Proven itself published plenty of videos mocking competitors’ locks.

In court, Proven’s lawyer admitted their own employee had replicated McNally’s shim trick, prompting the defense to ask the obvious question: “When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]?”

God d—n. You know you’re f—ked when a simple question comes off like a sick burn. Of course, the court ruled McNally’s video was fair use, transformative, and accurate. Proven lost its injunction and was soon dismissed entirely.

The company tried to seal the court record, complaining of harassment from McNally fans, but by then the Streisand Effect had taken hold. By pulling a drill and trying to make sure no one put in the newspaper that he got mad, Lee amplified the story to heights it would never have reached otherwise.

Let this be a lesson to us all: sometimes you just gotta shut the f—k up and fix the lock.