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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."
"Carreon is also suing the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society"
That can't be good for business
I see what you did there! Nice.
captcha: excites. Lol.
No, only you can do that. ;)
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
I need to file a patent on frivolous lawsuits. I know exactly how I'd word the letter announcing my intent to protect my IP.
"Yo dawg, I heard you like to sue, so I'm suing you for suing, so you can go to court for going to court..."
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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.
FunnyJunk isn't suing.
FunnyJunk's Lawyer is suing.
So you're saying Funky Junk is worse than cancer?
I love it. It's so open and shut in favor of The Oatmeal. He never incited anyone. He in fact mentions that he DIDN'T incite anyone and that it was FunnyJunk who messaged their userbase to confront The Oatmeal, or at least very heavily implied they should. Everything The Oatmeal has done is retaliatory, in defense, and FJ has been on the offense for the entire situation.
God knows why. Money I suppose. The Oatmeal's comics are popular and probably bring a lot of traffic when the comics are linked to FJ and not The Oatmeal.
Everytime the owner of FJ speaks he tries to paint himself as the one being hurt, but all the damage is self-induced by the bad PR he's constantly causing by sending rude messages and generally un-gentlemanly behavior.
Now if this ever does reach court, I'm sure it'll be decently long as FJ tries to throw everything it can at The Oatmeal because if they lose the Streisand Effect will hit even harder. I'm sure at least some users will leave, but more importantly they'll lose many potential users just because of they'll be shown beforehand how FJ operates.
Either way, I'm going to just grab some popcorn and enjoy. I can't wait for The Oatmeal's response to this. Should have just complied with the takedown request (it was a request, The Oatmeal never once filed a DMCA) but apparently the owner of FJ just can't stand being told (asked) what to do.
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?
In other news, cancer has decided that the enemy of its enemy is its friend and has thus teamed up with FunnyJunk. The resulting entity has not yet been named, but FunCancer is currently favored.
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".
Submitter here. I forgot to mention in the summary he's also the lawyer for FunnyJunk.
My work here is dung.
Cancerjunk was rejected on the grounds that they might face trademark conflicts from Lance Armstrong.
Too Soon?
I don't know who FunnyJunk or TheOatmeal are, and this article doesn't inspire me to find out.
Korma: Good
How many submissions/comments and how short/long his UID is doesn't make you more literate than him.
Some of their money does go to things that are arguably worthwhile. But a lot of it isn't even going to things like family support or end of life quality care either. The Relays for example often cost almost as much money to run as they get out of them, so the Relay for Life ends up having no substantial amount of money go anywhere useful http://www.jafsica.com/2010/04/26/life-death-cancer/. This is a big part of why the ACS only gets three stars on financials by Charity Navigator http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6495. Many other groups dedicated to fighting cancer get better numbers from Charity Navigator, either in the financial category or for overall, or both.
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.
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.
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!
I see this complaint a lot, both here and other places, about 'hypocricy' of the users of a site.
I always wonder what is moving through that brain of yours. Yes, some users would jump at the chance to bash the RIAA in your example above, while other users would jump to the defense of TheOatmeal in this example.
That's not hypocricy, thats two different sets of users voicing opinions on an open forum. Because of the type of people a site like this brings in, you'll have a lot of people who hate the RIAA. And you'll have a lot of people who support someone like TheOatmeal in this situation. It doesn't mean its the same people however.
Its all togeather possible you have two subcultures that dont cross often, though im sure they exist. Hypocricy is owned on a personal level, you cant blame the entire site for it unless you're a fool.
Thats all I wanted to say, back to tilting at windmills as you please.