Oh man.
Guys. This could take a while. You've probably read some of the background before but bear with me.
This is FunnyJunk. It's kind of like YouTube for funny images, which means people post a lot of copyrighted stuff there without permission.
A year ago, Matthew Inman, who does the comic/blog/thing The Oatmeal, got pissed off that almost everything he's ever done was posted to the site without attribution and wrote a blog post about it. There was some
Internet pissing back and forth but at least some of his comics got taken off FJ as a result.
That was last summer. Last week, he gets
this letter from FJ's lawyer. The gist of it: "We took some of your pictures off our site, so you have to delete the blog post you wrote before that happened, or we'll sue you for defamation. Oh, and give us $20,000." Inman writes a great response about how stupid this is, and then starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser to collect $20,000 - which he will send to the National Wildlife Federation and American Cancer Society. FJ's lawyer won't get any of the money, but he will get a
picture of the money. And a comic that depicts his mother trying to have sex with a bear.
For some reason the lawyer in question was not happy about this, and started whining about how people are being mean to him on the Internet now that they know he's a complete douchebag. So Friday, he
sued everybody. "Everybody" meaning Matthew Inman (for saying mean things about him),
IndieGoGo (for helping Matthew Inman raise money while saying mean things), and, I swear to God,
The American Cancer Society and National Wildlife Federation.
And that's why my brain is dribbling out my ears.
