FunnyJunk's Lawyer Surprised by Internet's Negative Response to His Legal Threats, Wants to Pull Plug on Oatmeal's Charity Fundraiser
"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," FunnyJunk's lawyer Charles Carreon told Digital Life's Rosa Golijan.
Carreon recently sent Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman a cease and desist on behalf of social aggregation website FunnyJunk informing him that failure to remove any and all instances of "defamation" against his client from his website would result in a lawsuit.
The source of the offence was a blog post Inman wrote excoriating FunnyJunk for repurposing his webcomics without attribution. Carreon demanded $20,000 in damages from Inman by June 12th.
Inman subsequently started raising the money through the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo — not to pay up, mind you. The 29-year-old plans to donate the money raised — half to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation — after sending FunnyJunk and their attorney a photo of the cash, along with a drawing of "your mom seducing a Kodiak bear."
"I'm completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat," Carreon complained. "I don't like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant."
He told Golijan that he intends to request that IndieGoGo disable the fundraising campaign, which has so far received over seven times more than the $20,000 goal Inman initially set. Carreon says he believes Inman's "Operation BearLove Good Cancer Bad" violates the terms of the site.
On Twitter, Inman sought to assuage at least one of the lawyer's concerns: "just to be clear I drew FJ's mother making saucy advances on the Kodiak bear, not the lawyer's. I wouldn't disrespect bears like that."
