Lawyer Carreon vs the Internet, via The Oatmeal

[Bester]

So, has anyone else been following the strange case of the lawyer that didn't know when to stop digging a hole for himself?

Here is the summary version. A year ago, The Oatmeal, who is a web comic creator (whose stuff I had never heard before all of this of but whose actual work I actually find kind of funny) found out that a site called Funnyjunk (sort of a YouTube for comics, captioned pictures, etc) had a ton of his stuff posted. He, on his blog, complained that FJ was taking advantage of safe harbor laws to make money, and that there wasn't anything he could do without spending a lot of time and/or money in a futile attempt to police. So he vented and was prepared to move on.

The Internet frowned.

There was a lot of back and forth for a while, but nothing concrete ever really materialized and after harassing the heck out of FJ people moved on. Enter last week. FJ hired a lawyer to legally threaten The Oatmeal to remove his old blog post (it was apparently rating higher on Google searches of "Funnyjunk" than the actual website itself, thanks to all the new sources that originally referenced it) and extort $20,000 dollars from him. The Oatmeal made fun of him with a webcomic and a pretty impressive retort of the legal threat letter, and posted it on his blog.

The Internet roared.

At this point, the popcorn is well and truly needed. The Internet has been hacking Carreon's site, making abusive phone calls and emails to him, and generally being the nuisance that the Internet has a tendency to be in all of it's uncouth glory. Carreon has turned around and sued The Oatmeal and two big charities (The National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society), in an apparent effort to become the become the most reviled and attacked lawyer the Internet has ever seen.

All-in-all, a great show. Just remember to pull out your popcorn before you start reading!

A smattering of links:
The Legal Threat
The Internet's Retaliation
The Lawyer's Reaction
[url=http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012 ... l-creator/]The Lawyer Files Lawsuit for "Inciting Cyber-Vandalism[url]

[Spec8472]

Don't forget the awesome letter that The Oatmeal's lawyers sent in reply to Carreon - it's a thorough ripping apart of the claims made: http://www.scribd.com/doc/96850920/Funn ... l-Response

Popehat has a bunch of fun posts on it:

http://www.popehat.com/2012/06/12/hey-d ... e-oatmeal/
http://www.popehat.com/2012/06/13/how-d ... -bullying/
http://www.popehat.com/2012/06/15/the-o ... -internet/
http://www.popehat.com/2012/06/17/the-o ... everybody/

[Bester]

I have to say my favorite part so far is the following line in the lawsuit Carreon actually filed:

"In order to initiate an Internet jihad against Plaintiff and FJ, Inman unloaded the contents of his “Hitler’s porta-potty” on Plaintiff and FJ..."

This has to be the first time a line like that was ever used in a legal document.

[boballab]

Carreon has turned around and sued The Oatmeal and two big charities (The National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society), in an apparent effort to become the become the most reviled and attacked lawyer the Internet has ever seen.

He has a very long way to go to become the most reviled attorney, once you remember a now defunct operation called Righthaven. Righthaven's entire existence was to threaten bloggers that they will sue them since they used a blurb in their stories that was copyrighted by the Las Vegas Review Journal and/or the Denver Post. Since most bloggers couldn't fight back, they ended up not only making payment to Righthaven, they had to give up their domain names, until they sued the wrong blogger and a charity. They lost both cases in US District Court in Nevada and got counter sued, couldn't pay the settlement, had their offices raided by the US Marshall and lost their right to use the name "Righthaven".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righthaven

The entry in Wikipedia on who bought Righthaven Domain Name and what they planned to use it for is IRONY at it's best:

On December 21, 2011, the righthaven.com domain name was transferred to the receiver for auction.[28] On January 6, 2012, the righthaven.com domain name sold for $3,300 to a Switzerland-based hosting service with the stated goal of protecting clients against "frivolous or overly aggressive take-down tactics".

[dawich]

Cantor and Siegel were way up there for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_C ... tha_Siegel