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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."
Honestly: He messed up.
He should have gone on the extreme offensive and sued the shit out of Funny Junk once he got that letter. I found what he did amusing, as well as good for humanity (with his charity) - but in the end he let a useless website continue on churning out stolen content.
Granted, Inman said he seeked council before doing what he did, so perhaps he knew it was inevitable. The court case should be amusing, to say the least. I hope he counter sues for 200x the amount.
But, really suing a charity that's at least trying to fight cancer?
If he thinks he's under a shitstorm now, he just better hope it never hits the mainstream press.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Before everyone finishes patting themselves on the back about how stupid Carreon is, how he has invoked the Streisand effect and a bunch of bad PR ask yourself this: How many of us had honestly even heard of Funnyjunk before today.
Given that it contains so much user submitted content, imagine how many ads have been served on pages where people have gone to flame them, despite the bulk of slashdot readers using adblocks on unfamiliar sites.
I wonder if his ego might still have them laughing all the way to the bank depending on how long it takes them to drop or settle the suits. Even before the internet its been known in marketing that the only bad publicity is no publicity.
Ice Cream has no bones.
The summary is so poorly written, assuming that the reader knows and cares about tiny details and any of players, that I am finally convinced the real Slashdot is dead.
Sorry to suck so badly. I'll try harder next time. Thought my name was good around here but apparently I'm the end of Slashdot. Care to rewrite the summary in a concise manner so I can take notes? It's really really easy to leave empty criticisms with no valid critiques and rhetoric about how Slashdot is dead. But someone's modding you up so I'll bite. You have zero submissions and 150 comments? I hate to say it but I think I've been registered on here a bit longer than you and have been a little more active (that's me on the hall of fame list for submitters) ... but we who paraphrase, link, write book reviews and write comments with content, we're the ones who are ruining Slashdot? Got it.
My work here is dung.
Never heard of Funny Junk before this. But, I still have never visited their site. So, no gain for them really.
I visited for you. It's really shitty. Basically, it's all the racist and stupid shit that your idiot high school classmate posts on facebook collected in one place.
For example, on the front page of funny junk right now there is a joke about black people who say "shizzle" and eat fried chicken. And, its not even funny. FunnyJunk is run by an idiot scumbag, for idiot scumbags.
Well, from what we know of this guy, it seems he really is the internet version of an ambulance chaser. He got a lucky break in the sex.com brouhaha, and now like a gambler that won a lottery jackpot he's scratching every card he can buy, desperate for the next big win. After all, look at this line from the Comic Riffs blog report:
Carreon tells Comic Riffs one of his goals is to become the go-to attorney for people who feel they have been cyber-vandalized or similarly wronged on the Internet.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/funnyjunk-lawyer-suing-the-oatmeal-cartoonist-inman-over-indiegogo-charity-drive/2012/06/18/gJQAbZhDlV_blog.html
We can only hope that his hubris will soon make him the disgraced pariah that he needs to be.
I have a hunch that the FunnyJunk owner is not really all that interested any more, and that Carreon picked this fight as a way to gain a reputation. Now his ego won't let him back down, and in his world the Oatmeal is now the Moby Dick to his Ahab, with FunnyJunk tricked into being his Pequod.
Yeah, at this point it's just a publicity stunt. The cynic in me doesn't believe Carreon is dumb; look at all the extra attention and internet traffic this little affair has started.
Which is why you need a loser pays system. Right now he can hire 1 shmuck lawyer for $100 and tie up (potentially) good companies in the defence of a frivolous suit who have to pay $500 p/h lawyers to debunk the 1 shmuck. Under a loser pays system, FunnyJunk would be liable for the court costs of the people he sues if he didn't have a water tight case (Read: Just doing this for publicity).
Personally I've never heard of FunnyJunk before a few days ago, but I've just added it to the blacklist of my routers DNS relay, just in case I accidentally visit it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Are we really going down the personal anecdote road? Because if so we can. My mother is a cancer survivor. Both my grandmothers died of cancer. My aunt is as we speak recovering from a relapse of stomach cancer. My little brother's nanny has cancer and they just made the decision to only give palliative care because there's not much else they can do. So if we're going down that road, I think I'm allowed to say that just because some people feel good from Relay for Life doesn't mean tat Relay for Life is the best or most efficient way to do so. It is possible to do almost everything Relay for Life does and still actually raise money. In fact, many Relay participants don't realize how little money actually goes to anything other than Relay expenses. Whether that's because they haven't looked into it or have been actively misinformed seems to vary from person to person, but either way, lying by either omission or commission to cancer survivors isn't good behavior.
So in a loser pays system, what happens if you're on the wrong end of a lawsuit from one of those $500/hr lawyer teams and you can only pony up for a $150/hour lawyer and you lose?
Here is where lawyers do something called "no-win, no-fee". If you've got a semi-decent defence (remember that the plaintiff has the burden of proof, they must prove what they say you did, you need only provide enough evidence to cast that into doubt) a high priced lawyer may choose to take on your case on a no-win, no-fee basis as he's got a good chance of winning his high price off the plaintiff. A lot of firms do no-win no fee in Australia.
No-win, no-fee can be used in the reverse (by a plaintiff of "claimant") but 1. they need rock solid evidence and 2. I'm assuming in your example that the lawsuit is a sham and the defender is innocent.
Loser pays is not perfect and by far not impossible to game but it's a hell of a lot better then the alternatives. It's been working in Australia and other nations for over 20 years now, if it were that easy to game someone would have done it by now. Instead people who launch frivolous suits like the MPIAA/RIAA are afraid to do so in Australia as they would be responsible for the costs, they tried suing one ISP and are currently trying to get the amount they have to pay for the defendants lawyers reduced.
Lets try this scenario again except changing the "loser pays" system to the "American rule" where each side is responsible for their own fees.
what happens if you're on the wrong end of a lawsuit from one of those $500/hr lawyer teams and you can only pony up for a $150/hour lawyer and you lose?
So what happens here, you can only afford a cheap lawyer regardless of your chances of winning?
Not only have your chances not decreased because they can afford better lawyers and are at no risk from losing, your chances of being sued frivolously have increased because they will never be punished for it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.