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FunnyJunk Sues the Oatmeal Over TM and "Incitement To Cyber-Vandalism"
eldavojohn writes "You may recall from last week the news item concerning FunnyJunk's extortion ... er ... threat of defamation lawsuit against The Oatmeal highlighting a fairly pervasive problem of rehosting content — in this case web comics. Instead of expediting a payment of $20,000 to FunnyJunk, Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal decided to crowd source the money (with 8 days left he has only garnered 900% of his goal) and donate it to charity after sending a picture of it to FunnyJunk. Charles Carreon (the man who has FunnyJunk) has made statements of Inman saying 'I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails.' In an interview Carreon says 'So someone takes one of my letters and takes it apart. That doesn't mean you can just declare netwar, that doesn't mean you can encourage people to hack my website, to brute force my WordPress installation so I have to change my password. You can't encourage people to violate my trademark and violate my twitter name and associate me with incompetence with stupidity, and douchebaggery. And if that's where the world is going I will fight with every ounce of force in this 5'11 180 pound frame against it. I've got the energy, and I've got the time.' Well it appears that Carreon has filed suit over these matters alleging 'trademark infringement and incitement to cyber-vandalism.' Speaking of douchebaggery, Charles Carreon curiously fails to mention that he first incited all of his users to harass The Oatmeal anyway they can which they dutifully did. One last juicy detail is that Carreon is also suing the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society to which Inman's crowd sourced money is going. Luckily, Inman's lawyer appears to be fully competent and able to address Carreon's complaints."
FunnyJunk isn't suing.
FunnyJunk's Lawyer is suing.
Don't be too quick to judge the ACS. There's already a shitton of money being thrown at research. They do other things with the money as well, like supporting families while their loved one is in treatment, or helping terminally ill people have a chance at a semi-normal last few months of life.
The issue is not as cut-and-dried as "very little of their money goes to things like research".
The title is wrong. FunnyJunk isn't suing, their lawyer Charles Carreon is. He's not representing them, he's representing himself. At least, that's what I got from the title of the case on Courthouse News Service, "Charles Carreon v Matthew Inman".
It really was very poorly written. Here are some tips:
- Get rid of the sarcastic editorializing like "FunnyJunk's extortion ... er ... threat of defamation". It is immature and doesn't help the summary in anyway. Right or wrong, you should keep your opinions to yourself.
- Formatting is your friend. A wall of text does not make for an interesting read. As somebody pointed out you quoted too much of the linked article. People know how to read for themselves.
- Some of your wording is awkward. "with 8 days left he has only garnered 900% of his goal". It makes the 900% look like a typo for 90%. You should have said "Even with 8 days remaining he has already surpassed his goal by $xx".
- Less links. I think you could have summarized where things stand more concisely and then listed links that people can reference for more information.
Hope that helps.
Amusement value of that statement aside, I don't doubt that his company employs/retains one hell of an expensive legal team, who are no doubt kept quite busy.
for every site like facebook or youtube that "makes it", how many sites are there that go under not because of lack of good ideas, or good management, but because of legal action (be it legit or otherwise)?
To this day I still remember the story of small upstart hardware manufacturer Aureal, who in the late 90s/early 2000s produced the first true competitor to Creative Lab's dominance of the PC sound card market. The hardware was cheaper, the features were more advanced, and the company was a hell of a lot better to deal with. Creative Lab's solution was to sue, sue, and sue some more. Aureal won every single time, but the cost of continiously defending themselves pushed them into bankruptcy, where they were purchased for pennies on the dollar... by Creative Labs.
so yeah, fuck that.
Please, if you want to help me, tell me what I was supposed to do with the quote in this article.
That's obvious. Don't use it. It's not a quote that's suitable for reprinting. Paraphrase, in as few words as possible. If /. readers don't believe you, they have the link and they can read for themselves.
As far as Forbes being "a reputable news source," you should have done your homework and noticed that Dave Thier is a freelance "contributor" to a Forbes blog, not to the magazine. Blogs are generally given less rigorous editorial treatment than news articles. You don't need to take everything written as gospel, punctuation, capitalization and all.
Also, skip all the "well it appears," "speaking of," "one more detail," etc. All of these phrases are totally superfluous. All they do is add words to the summary.
And kill the adverbs. Nobody cares whether you think the details are "juicy," just like nobody cares whether you think The Oatmeal's lawyer is "fully competent" (are you a lawyer yourself?). What's more, the overall sarcastic tone ("he only garnered 900 percent of his goal") doesn't help your case much, either.
Finally, it is incumbent upon you, as submitter, to explain what the story is about. Your summary starts with, "You may recall the story last week..." Sorry, no. I don't. What now? I'm afraid your summary leaves me totally in the dark as to who the players are and who did what to whom.
In short, this is meant to be a summary of a news story, not a post on your personal blog.
Breakfast served all day!
The summary is incorrect. Carreon is not FunnyJunk, and probably not the owner of FunnyJunk (I couldn't figure out who is). He represented FunnyJunk in the legal threats sent to Inman. There doesn't appear to be any lawsuit against Inman by FunnyJunk, but there is a lawsuit by Carreon, a lawyer, (who is representing himself pro se) against Inman, IndieGoGo, ACS, and NWF.
As William Butler Yeats puts it in his apocalyptic vision of "The Second Coming"
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
blog
Yep. That is why we need an equal pay system. Each side pays the other side's lawyer an equal amount to what they pay their own. That way if Super-Mega-Corp want's to bring in $500/hour lawyers to crush Working-Two-Jobs-To-Make-Ends-Meet-Joe, Joe will have just as good of representation as Super-Mega-Corp.
Actual outcome: $500/hour lawyers get "paid layman rates," while their uncles/children/foreign bank accounts collect the remainder. See college athletes.
FunnyJunk is like YouTube - a reasonably popular site where users upload content and other users view that content while advertisements around it garner YouTube some money for the service provided.
Somewhat true. The difference appears to be that funnyjunk is mostly other people's stuff and there's less user generated stuff.
TheOatmeal is like the RIAA - somebody who believes their content, in this case comics, was 'stolen' and sent a DMCA take-down notice while lambasting that very same system because it doesn't foresee in preventing the same or future comics from being uploaded by users again and is hoping for stronger measures to be available in the future.
False. He never issued a DMCA take down, and in fact said it wasn't worth it. He mocked the site for their business model and said it was difficult to try and work with them. Mostly, he vented about the situation.
The RIAA engaged in legal action. The Oatmeal never did. After they complained, the people at Funnyjunk threatened to sue him.
Then when he made fun of that threat and sent the money instead to two charities, the lawyer representing funnyjunk decided to sue the Oatmeal AND THE TWO CHARITIES.
There's no RIAA/Oatmeal comparison to be made. The RIAA are a bunch of litigious jerks. Charles Carreon is a litigious jerk. The Oatmeal has only reacted to funnyjunk and Carreon, and has been damned reasonable about it.