On Friday, attorney Charles Carreon has filed a lawsuit against Matthew Inman (proprietor of popular web comic The Oatmeal), IndieGoGo Inc., the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. The suit will require the NWF and ACS to spend operation funds on their lawyers instead of protecting animals and battling cancer.
The whole ordeal started about one year ago, when Inman wrote a blog post about users of the website FunnyJunk reposting his comics without his permission or attribution. Inman also found FunnyJunk users were reposting material from more than a dozen other popular comics, including XKCD, Cyanide & Happiness, and Calvin and Hobbes. FunnyJunk responded by telling its users that Inman planned to sue them (which is not true) and taking down the select few comics on the site that actually credited The Oatmeal.
Then, one year later, FunnyJunk hired Carreon to do their dirty work and threatened to sue Inman for copyright infringement, unless he coughed up $20,000 to FunnyJunk. Inman decided to raise the $20,000, but instead donate it all to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. He collected donations through IndieGoGo, and in less than 24 hours he’d already hit $100,000.
This was when things seemed to shift from Carreon representing FunnyJunk to simply fighting for his own purposes, trying to get retribution for some nasty comments he received in response to his legal threat against The Oatmeal. Carreon threatened to shut down the fundraiser, claiming it violated IndieGoGo’s terms of service. During Carreon’s interview with Forbes, he compared Inman’s charity campaign “to when people would sell tickets to throw balls at women being accused of witches in a dunking tank.”
Friday’s lawsuit is the newest development. In the text, Carreon asserts that Inman and IndieGoGo did not follow California law in collecting charitable contributions, and that NWF and ACS did not enter into written agreements with Inman. Carreon phrases the suit as if he were the champion of these charities, stating Inman could pocket all donations exceeding the original $20,000 amount he said he would donate. In reality, Inman already stated he’d give 100 percent of the money to charities, and plans to add a couple more charities to his list.
Inman’s IndieGoGo fundraiser has already reached about $200,000 — ten times the original goal — and it is set to end on June 25.
We’ll be firing up the popcorn popper and sitting back to watch the drama. This is going to be quite an educational experience for Mr. Carreon as he learns just how powerful the Internet can be when it gets riled up by overreaching lawsuits.