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FunnyJunk v. the Oatmeal: Copyright Infringement Complaints As Defamation
An anonymous reader writes "Funny as it might sound, FunnyJunk's threat of litigation against The Oatmeal raises a very important issue: the extent to which artists can complain in public about perceived or actual infringement of their works by user-generated content websites. Does it matter if the content creator accused the website of condoning or participating in the infringement?" The short story is this: Numerous Oatmeal comics were posted without permission to FunnyJunk; Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman lambasted FunnyJunk in the form of a blog post. FunnyJunk responded with a suit (or rather the threat of a suit) accusing Inman of willful defamation, unless he ponies up $20,000, which he doesn't plan to do.
Matthew is accepting donations, will take a picture of all his monies to send to the FunnyJunk attorneys, and will donate it all to charity.
Right now it's standing at over $100k. Go internet!
The Oatmeal was correct. All the offending links worked yesterday.
Now, FunnyFart has done some quick scrubbing.
The WWF and Cancer Society will be very pleased.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
I believe that to file a DMCA take down... you are supposed to be the copyright holder. AFAIK, the DMCA isn't intended for just any crazy yahoo to claim that something is copyrighted and should be taken down. They SHOULD be asking for your contact information, in order to ensure that it is a valid notice.
Of course, contracting out groups to file DMCA notices on your behalf is another topic...
Ok, because you can't click links appently.
1. Oatmeal rattles dmca sabre asking for take downs of some comics, and points out many many many many many more than are infringing
2. Take down eventually occurs after much hassle
3. Oatmeal points out take down takes too long, but why not show readers whats happening anyway by linking to said site, while blogging about it
4. Google Ranks oatmeal highly due to incoming links / likes / everyone likes oatmeal!
5. FunkyJunk notice this, get lawyer.
6. FunkyJunk send nasty message asking for $20,000
7. Oatmeal posts saying, "yeah right, because you've removed all the infringing content, right?
8. FunkyJunk removes linked comics.
The question is, whos onus is it to report the infringing content when it appears to be uploaded again after being removed?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
but axing them after issuing a legal threat alleging that assertions of copyright infringement were defamatory sure smells like destruction of evidence... And courts tend to take a very dim view of destruction of evidence...
So let's talk about FJ's strategy in this quagmire they've created. First it started out with a pretty innocuous (though informative) question post and there is no indication of an offensive attack between one party or the other. FJ's response to this is to respond by describing two completely different scenarios to everyone while destroying evidence. First, they contact all their users and alledge that The Oatmeal is suing FJ while in reality they fire a threat of slander and libel lawsuit at The Oatmeal. Meanwhile The Oatmeal is being harassed by FJ users who seem to be confused that this is about The Oatmeal doesn't believe FJ has any members and is really just a bot.
Basically the FJ admin and/or legal team is playing this like a money making entity would -- they're doing everything in their power to make users see one situation and the original content creators face another situation. And that's what happens when revenues are threatened, bad people get creative in bad ways and it usually has a very bad effect but is effective nonetheless. I hope The Oatmeal sticks to his guns on this one -- he's definitely in the right and he's definitely tackling a problem that persists on imgur, FunnyJunk and a number of other sites (yes, even YouTube).
My work here is dung.
You forgot 3.5, in which the FunnyJunk admin sends an email to all FunnyJunk users and tells them that Inman is trying to shut the site down. He then encourages them to harass Inman via email and Facebook.