Proven Industries v. Trevor McNally

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In 2025, Proven Industries, a lock company, is attempting to sue Trevor McNally, a lockpicking expert on multiple social media platforms, for various questionable damages caused by the publishing of a currently delisted video demonstrating McNally picking the lock with a makeshift shim.

Background

In March 2025, Proven Industries published a video on Instagram, featuring their Latch Pin Lock and a Proven Industries staff member using a number of tools on the lock and stating that there was no way for anyone to bypass the lock. In the comments of that video a user by the name of gq_videos said "Let's introduce it to the @mcnallyoffical poke" someone at Proven Industries responded to that comment by posting: "lol those guys like the cheap locks lol because they are easy and fast".

On April 2025, Trevor McNally published a response video on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram intended to both educate and entertain users on the insecurity of the lock via the usage of a makeshift shim created out of a soda can. In response to McNally's video, Proven Industries submitted takedown requests of the videos on all of these platforms, and then soon after filed a lawsuit against McNally.

Proven Industries posted a response video to McNally, called "Our Latch Pin Lock isn't going anywhere! Our customers know we make the BEST product on the market!" They did not name McNally, but the same staff member in their original video drank from a can of Liquid Death (the same drink McNally had used to create a lock shim).However, they changed their strategy in June and asked the judge in the legal case to issue an emergency injunction to ban Trevor McNally from making any content about Proven Industries while the court case was progressing.

A screenshot taken from a taken down McNally video displaying Proven Industries' copyright claim over the video

Lawsuit

Claims

1. Copyright infringement Cited multiple times inside of the legal document, Proven Industries attempts to claim that McNally was not following fair use doctrine for the purposes of his video. Notably due to the takedown of McNally's content, Proven instead uses screenshots to demonstrate theft, seen in sections 27 and 29 of the document.
2. Defamation
3. False advertising Proven Industries claims that McNally falsely advertised the ease in bypassing the lock in sections 32-35, and directly claimed that McNally was acting childish to support these claims. Additionally in sections 36-40, Proven claims that McNally was doctoring the footage, as the shim was shown deformed through the video, despite how aluminum is capable of being easily deformed under stress.
4. Violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (“FDUTPA”) This claim was made despite the defendant living in Virginia.
5. Torturous interference
6. Unjust enrichment Covered in section 4 in the introduction:

   On information and belief, McNally is affiliated with and/or an agent of Covert Instruments (hereinafter "Covert"), a company that sells lock-picking tools. McNally lists Covert's website on his social media pages, and Covert Instruments' website features McNally and benefits from the misleading content McNally produces.

   This claim has been cited as questionable by consumers and the media considering the fact that the shim was made from an ordinary object rather than any product sold on the website.
7. Civil conspiracy
8. Trade libel

Additionally, Proven attempted to file an emergency injunction against McNally to prevent further posting about the flaws of their locks, called for within this injunction was emergency relief for damages that exclude engineering costs to resolve the lock's vulnerability, meaning if Proven Industries is to win this case, the company will neglect to resolve the flaws of the lock itself.

Rebuttal

1. Trevor McNally's lawyers claimed that Section 107 of the Copyright Act allows fair use of copyrighted material for "criticism, comment, news reporting, [or] teaching" and that the video that the take down request was made on was covered by protected use on all four factors of the section.
2. His lawyers also claimed his video was transformative and that the portions he included were there to facilitate criticism.
3. The original Proven Industries was minimally creative and had already been published and McNally's reuse was minimal and integral to his criticism of the Latch Pin Lock.
4. McNally's use of extracts from Proven Industries video had no effect on Proven Industries, as there is no market for their video and people watching his video would not take away views of their video.
5. The defamation claims of Proven Industries would fail, as they were based on claims made against non-verbal acts, where Proven Industries didn't actually have any written statements to back up their claims that McNally was making false claims in his response video. (Essentially McNally never actually said Proven Industries was "dishonest or incompetent" and also never said their lock was "inherently untrustworthy.") McNally made a further video called "They called me out…now they’re suing me. Proven Locks" as a response to the claim that he had to disassemble the lock to create a bespoke shim and then reassemble it. In that video, he took a case of Liquid Death and opened an Amazon Locker and removed a boxed new Proven Industries Latch Pin Lock, drank the drink, cut up the can, created a shim and talked though how the shim process works.
6. Proven Industries's tortious interference claims were invalid.
7. Public interest always favours supporting First Amendment rights.

Outcome

1. Trevor McNally's lawyers objected to Proven Industries's request for an emergency injunction against Trevor McNally and the request for an emergency injunction was denied.
2. There were some blunders in the Proven Industries side of the legal case. These include:
   1. A witness said to be the Proven Industries lock expert not being able to explain to the judge if he was an employee of Proven Industries or another company and also admitting that he did learn how to shim the Latch Pin Lock after watching McNally's videos and practicing for a while. (This statement undermined the Proven Industries assertion that McNally had disassembled the lock and used trickery to make it appear that he had shimmed the lock. That assertion was the main thrust of their case against McNally.)
   2. When asked about their process for making sure their locks were not vulnerable, the answer from a Proven Industries witness was that nobody calling their customer services department had complained that one of their locks had been opened up by a shim attack. (The average consumer would probably not be able to recognise a lock that had been opened by a shim attack. This answer also made it appear like Proven Industries did not engage people with the sort of skills that Trevor McNally has to test their own products to destruction and may have done more damage to their own reputation than McNally's videos.)
   3. When asked, by the judge, about imported lock cylinders, a Proven Industries witness struggled to recall the details and had to estimate how many of their lock cylinders are imported from Europe and China.
3. Proven Industries submitted witness statements and included personal information about their witnesses (including a witness who had expressed concern about being names) without asking for their documents to be submitted under seal. They later complained to the judge that their staff were being harassed and suggested this was somehow McNally's fault. And they made a request to the judge to retro-actively put all the documents in the court case under seal. McNally's lawyers objected to this, citing that Proven Industries had boasted on social media that they were going to use the court case to reveal McNally as a fraud and had therefore created public interest in the case, when they thought it would benefit them. Ian Runkle (a Canadian lawyer who had been creating YouTube videos about the case) also submitted an objection to all the documents in the legal case being sealed. Runkle's objection was stricken from the record by the judge.
4. Proven Industries filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss their case without prejudice. The copyright strikes against Trevor McNally have been lifted.

The Latch Pin Lock with the vulnerability to shim attacks is still on sale and no product recall has yet been issued.

In the aftermath of the case another lock company, called PacLock launched a legal case against Proven Industry, claiming that Ronald Lee, II of Proven Industries had committed perjury, due to Proven Industries making heavy use of the term "made in the USA" in their advertising material and then Ronald Lee, II admitting in the McNally case that they import large numbers of lock cylinders from outside the USA.

Consumer response

Coverage on these legal proceedings from media outlets appear to look down upon Proven Industries' attempts to sue McNally.

From consumers, notably legal professional Runkle of the Bailey, call out the questionable nature of each claim within the legal document. From the subreddit r/LockPickingLawyer, many users back McNally's response towards Proven.

Trevor McNally's personal response from the legal proceedings started with a short and hastily shot short clip to disprove most claims shown in the document by picking the lock mere seconds after obtaining the lock. This has continued into a series of clips demonstrating other locks sold by Proven Industries being bypassed by McNally.