Go up against the internet, and you will lose. Earlier this week, a spat between Funnyjunk.com and The Oatmeal’s Matt Inman turned ugly/awesome, after the website demanded payment from Inman for “defamation claims,” and Inman raised over $100,000 dollars for charity as a way of saying “no.”
Now, the website of Funnyjunk’s lawyer Charles Carreon is down, claiming it’s “Due to security attacks instigated by Matt Inman.”
I don’t doubt that Funnyjunk’s lawyer has been the target of less than savory actions by the legions of people supporting Inman, but calling Inman out for “instigating” any attacks is shakier than a horse on rollerblades. Inman even blacked out all of Carreon’s contact information in the response letter he posted. The fact that this suit is about defamation to begin with raises further questions – shouldn’t lawyers accusing others of defamation be extra-careful about how they hurl accusations?
Comments
This keeps getting more ridiculous. Considering it starts with the premise that you can sue someone because they complain about your theft of their property, I don’t see it making a successful swim for the shores of sanity any time soon.
How dare you threaten Charles Carreon like that! Who do you think you are? This is outrageous. You sound like you’re part of a conspiracy to attack Charles Carreon! Question: Is Matthew Robert Inman related to Bobby Ray Inman? Is that the answer to all this weirdness?
Mrs. Carreon,
I think you should speak to your husband before you make any further comments, accusations or rants about Matt Inman.
Your comments on The Guardian this morning (http://tinyurl.com/ctge6je) are, to be delicate, disturbing. Its clear from your comments there and here, you are very upset.
Had your husband taken more than a few minutes to investigate FunnyJunk’s position, he may have thought twice about taking on a client of questionable ethics. Or maybe not. Maybe he thought a well drafted letter to a small businessman would gain him and his client a few grand. Whatever the case, your husband and FunnyJunk are in the wrong.
It seems odd that your husband bills himself as an ‘internet attorney’ and seems to be astonished that people on the internet would rally behind a cause.
Do you read newspapers? Own a TV? Are you familiar with ‘Anonymous’?
Planned or not, you have kicked (driven over?) the hornest nest. The internet does not take kindly to bullies, much less bullies who demand $20,000 from the victim who has had their creative work stolen. Mr. Inman not only has the truth on his side, but he has the power of millions people sitting at their computers loving the fact they are getting under your skin. My advice? Have your husband drop FunnyJunk as a client and apologize.
Ms. Carreon:
Can you think of a way to confirm that you are, in fact, the Tara Carreon married to the Charles Carreon who is the attorney in this story? Perhaps you could have your husband confirm it from his Twitter account.
For that matter, can you confirm that this is you commenting at the Guardian? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/13/oatmeal-funnyjunk-legal-threats?commentpage=1#comment-16614116
The reason I ask is that it is common in such situations for trolls to pose as participants and leave inflammatory comments to make the participants look bad. Your comments, with all respect, are consistent with that.
Ken
Did it ever occur to anyone that the reason that Matt Inman is so popular is because he appeals to the degenerate forces which have made all of our lives so miserable in this world? i.e., the rapists, looters, and warmongers who love nothing more than seeing a hipster sadistically put into a woodchipper, a baby being kicked, or a woman being ridiculed?
The reason he is so popular is because he is completely ridiculous. He over exaggerates things and makes fun of absolutely everything. He doesn’t encourage people to go out and kick a baby, or throw people into a woodchipper or anything like that.
Did it ever occur to you that your husband has gone over board? First he takes a lawsuit with no merit. Second he responds by trying to have a fundraiser for a good cause shut down. Now he has started claiming that Matt instigated an attack on him. Matt did not instigate anything. He never tells his readers to do things like that. If any of his viewers did anything it was purely their own thought an idea and is in no way associated with Matt Inman. The Admin of Funnyjunk on the other hand, the one that Charles Carreon is trying to claim is the victim in this, blatantly told his members to go harass Matt. He told them that Matt was threatening a lawsuit and going to have funnyjunk shut down which was not even close to the truth.
As much as you are trying to defend Charles, in truth you are just making him look worse by posting these ridiculous comments.
I find your comment about The Oatmeal quite amusing and seriously hypocritical considering you seem to have no issue ridiculing women on your website by photo shopping their faces to create false pictures with naked mens genitals or womens breasts. Not cartoons mind you, but their actual faces.
http://www.american-buddha.com/mondo.kathleenturner.htm
http://www.american-buddha.com/mondocannibafeast2.htm
Matt Inman seems to be the de facto leader of the modern American Hitler Youth:
http://mixergy.com/matthew-inman-oatmeal-interview/
Andrew: How do you respond to someone who says, “This is the worst comic I ever saw in my life”?
Matt: When I used to work for people I had this sense of diplomacy. I had to respond like, “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. I appreciate your criticism,” and blah, blah, blah. Now I work for myself and really no one can control what I say. So usually I tell them that I slept with their mom or I say the most vile, awful thing I can think of. If you read my Twitter account, it is like Hitler’s port-a-potty. It’s the worst thing that you’ve ever seen, just this awful stuff that I say to my critics on there. Just to troll them, mostly. So that’s usually how I respond to it. Like a drunk 15 year old, I think, is the best way to put it….
Andrew: What about in the beginning when you were going into Digg and you knew that if you won this group of people over, they’d send you massive traffic and if you turned them into haters, they’d bury you and you wouldn’t get anything from them. At that point, weren’t you nervous?
Matt: Yeah. At that point, I wouldn’t have gotten on Digg and been like, “Hey, your mom and I made love under the stars. Ha ha ha. I liked it.” That probably wouldn’t go over so well. But now I’m kind of at this comfortable level. And part of my writing style and the persona that I have online is sort of this crass, bloated, obese, drunk monster.
Wait… there’s a old American Hitler Youth?
And Godwin’s Law takes effect…
How exactly does that little excerpt prove anything? Is it because he said hitler? Oh, wow, I guess every history teacher that ever mentioned hitler must be a nazi.
I’m no lawyer, but making such claims about someone if they weren’t true might be dangerous. Someone might think such accusations rise to the level of slander against Mr. Inman. I hope Mr. Carreon was careful to be clear that this was his opinion, and not a statement of fact, or that he has some reasonable evidence. After all, it would be a tragedy if Mr. Carreon was to find himself the defendant in a slander lawsuit.
s/tragedy/delicious irony/
Go to lawschool, or shut up about the law.
I’ve been married to this man for 38 years, I was a legal secretary for over 20 years, I’m an Internet librarian, I’ve read “The Torture Papers,” actually typed the original White House torture memos before they came out in book form, or PDF, and I would NEVER think of giving a legal opinion. The law is like math. There’s an exactitude about it that is not friendly to irrational mindless stabbing in the dark.
If law is like math, then your husband clearly thinks that 1 + giraffe = potato.
Before you criticize someone for not going to “lawschool,” you should probably start calling it “law school.”
I don’t believe you are the real Mrs. Carreon. The real Mrs. Carreon would feel too much shame to come out in public. I would never give a legal opinion either. But I’ll give you a personal one: I think you are a lousy Internet troll. Even so, you are right about the mindless stabbing in the dark. This is precisely why I believe that someone who would send that letter to Mr. Inman, who would attempt to disrupt a charity fundraiser, and who would then effectively accuse Mr. Inman of a crime… I think that sort of a person should not be in the legal profession. I certainly would never let my self or my business be represented by a person like that. A smart person in that position would instead have suggested that perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, reaffirm his or her client’s commitment to policing their website for infringing content, and offer to instead donate $20,000 to charity. This might have been redirected into a positive, or at least less of a negative thing. It’s sad, really.