37 
The Oatmeal, the awesome web comic by Matthew Inman we all know and love, is being sued. The funny thing is that Inman reckons the site suing him, FunkyJunk, is actually a prolific thief of his work. This is his epic response.
There’s been no love lost between the Oatmeal and FunnyJunk for a while now, but the latter decided to take things to the next level with a formal cease and desist letter, plus a demand for $20,000 (£12,850) to avoid further action. Inman wasn’t exactly pleased, as you can imagine, so he decided to do what he does best and rip the piss out it in true hilarious Oatmeal fashion.
Inman didn’t stop there though; he also set up a charitable fundraiser “defence fund” aiming to generate $20,000 in cash. The idea was to take a picture of the accrued money and mail it to FunnyJunk, before donating the whole lot to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society — two worthy charities, even for us on this side of the pond, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Inman’s operation “BearLove Good. Cancer Bad.” managed to raise the $20,000 in just 64 minutes, and is currently standing at over $140,000 (£90,000) with 14 days left to go — it seems we’re not alone in our love for The Oatmeal.
While I’m not sure on the legalities of this kind of action from FunnyJunk, it looks like at least some good will come out of this. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take out The Oatmeal in the process. [The Oatmeal via Gawker]
The Oatmeal's Getting Sued Again
These Gummy Bears Are Actually a Painting
The Oatmeal Launches Fundraiser To Save Tesla Tower
I saw the article and loved it. Matthew Inman just has a knack for defending himself. His response to the guy from Forbes who tried to say his comic on Tesla was rubbish was also great.
I think Samsung should hire Matthew to work in their legal department. He could be in charge of responding to all the “patent infringement” letters they get from Apple.
Been following this since it started, I was reading how last night the lawyer working on behalf of funnyjunk has sort IndieGoGo to shut down the fund raiser. I’m trying to work out if he’s just dumb or evil – I’m thinking the first, he’s playing by text book but effectivly just said that he wants to deny $140k (+) to charity, that’s not going to go well in terms of support.
Feel sorry for Matthew having to draw out that ammount of money and photograph it! (Obv. its now going to be an oversizes charity cheque…)
My understanding is that the libel laws in the US are not nearly as draconian as they are over here, so I really hope he gets away with this. Loved it!
I should also add, that this is the good old Streisand Effect: the more you try to shut someone up online, the more people will hear about what you’re trying to silence
I’ve decided to mock these fools further by registering a couple of domains to commemorate their stupidity It’s http://funnyjunk.us/uck and http://charlescarreon.us/uck – hopefully that’ll show up in Google’s search results soon
The URLs you’ve registered will stand a better chance of showing up in Google search results if they weren’t simply forwarding URLs, but I like the idea.
Of course, by the logic of the lawyers writing to The Oatmeal, you only need to repeat your keywords on a page hosted at these addresses to rapidly displace your ‘competitors’. That part made me giggle.