Lawyer Charles Carreon has personally filed a lawsuit against the creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal for events surrounding the comic's charitable fundraiser, "Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad." Carreon's suit names Matthew Inman (aka "The Oatmeal"), the Indiegogo website Inman used to raise the money, and Inman's two charities of choice, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. Did we mention that Carreon sued 100 anonymous "Does" in the same suit, too?
The critical importance of... commercial fundraising?
Inman began raising the money in response to Carreon's demand for $20,000 on behalf of his client, a user-generated comedy site called FunnyJunk.com. The site believed that Inman had defamed them back in 2011. Inman responded in an indignant blog post and set up a fundraiser on Indiegogo.com to get that $20,000—though he planned to split it between the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society, not hand it over to Carreon. So far, Inman's campaign has raised $180,000, with eight days remaining.
Not to be outdone, Carreon filed a lawsuit on Friday (and on his own behalf, not for FunnyJunk). He released the court documents on his website Monday morning. In the suit, Carreon claims that Inman's fundraiser was conducted in violation of the California law pertaining to "commercial fundraisers," that someone incited by Inman created a fake Twitter account posing as Carreon, and that Inman incited "cyber-vandalism" again Carreon with the "Bear Love campaign."
The charges against Inman's fundraising may be the most serious, but they're also the oddest. Carreon says that Inman and his chosen charities had to take several steps in order to act within California law. Those steps include registering with the Attorney General's Registry of Charitable Trusts and making a written contract for inspection by the California Attorney General. Without those preliminary activities, all three parties are violating the law, says Carreon. The measures are meant to protect citizens from bogus fundraising attempts, and to keep commercial fundraiser from misrepresenting the charities or acting on their behalf without their input. The suit names the NWF and ACS because neither "have acted to disavow their association with the Bear Love campaign, thus lending their tacit approval to their use of their names to the Bear Love campaign."
None of the money should go to Inman, says Carreon, because "he is not a registered commercial fundraiser" but also because "the Bear Love campaign utilized false and deceptive statements and insinuations of bestiality on the part of Plaintiff and his client’s 'mother.'"
However, Inman's status as a commercial fundraiser is suspect. The definition of a commercial fundraiser cited in the lawsuit states that the individual or corporation doing the fundraising must being doing so "for compensation." According to Inman's initial statement of purpose, he planned to give all money raised to the charities and keep none for himself. The initial statement of purpose covered only the first $20,000, though the implication was that it would be split between NWF and ACS regardless of how much was raised. Said Inman in an update to the fundraising page on Wednesday: "A lot of people have been asking what I plan to do with the extra money we raised over the initial $20,000. 100 percent of it is going to charity. I’m going to add two more charities to the list, in addition to the ACS and the NWF."
Carreon also targets Indiegogo, the platform that is collecting the donations. Like other fundraising services such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo does business by taking a cut of successfully funded projects—in this case, nine percent (Update: Carreon misunderstood the funding structure in his court documents. Indiegogo takes nine percent only if the set goal is not met; if it is, the company takes four percent). Typically, sites like Indiegogo are used by parties raising money for their own use. From a quick browse around the site, raising money on behalf of another charity does seem unusual, if not unprecedented. Indiegogo told Ars on Friday that it had inspected the case with its lawyer, and it found the fundraiser to comply with its own terms of service.
In the face of the new lawsuit, it's not backing down. A site spokesperson told us today, "As the largest crowdfunding platform operating in nearly 200 countries, Indiegogo exists to provide crowdfunding opportunities worldwide, and a frivolous lawsuit doesn't change Indiegogo's commitment to this creative and popular campaign."
Inciting the Internet
Carreon is also suing Inman on two more personal counts: that Inman made, or got someone else to make, a fake Twitter account for Carreon, and that Inman sicced an Internet horde on him by starting Operation BearLove Good, Cancer Bad. Carreon says the fake Twitter account, which has since been suspended, infringed on Carreon's name (which Carreon recently trademarked) and that the tweets were "likely to cause such confusion, mistake, and/or deception among consumers."
On his actual Twitter account, Carreon offered $500 to anyone who would find the identity of the fake Twitter account creator.
Carreon also claims that the campaign incited a number of "Does" to e-mail him, and he is suing them, too. Carreon says his personal e-mail was tweeted by the fake Twitter account, though it was also publicly available via the WHOIS registration for his website, and people signed up his e-mail address up for "goods and services" including pornography website Saboom.com. Others attempted to take control of his website by cracking the password and attempting to reset it. While Inman's blog post on the initial letter from Carreon on behalf of FunnyJunk is indignant, it did not direct his readers to either Carreon's website or provide his e-mail address.
Inman himself did not respond to requests for comment, and Venkat Balasubramani, who is acting as Inman's legal counsel, declined to comment for this article.
For Carreon's part, his spirit has certainly not been broken by the force of the Internet, as evidenced by the lawsuit's page 11 description of Inman's infamous mom/bear cartoon that accompanied the Bear Love campaign. Indeed, Carreon seemed to revel in the writing of it: "In order to initiate an Internet jihad against Plaintiff and FJ [FunnyJunk], Inman unloaded the contents of his 'Hitler’s porta-potty' on Plaintiff and FJ, drawing a misogynistic cartoon depicting an obese woman dressed in her underwear, with pendulous breasts popping out of her brassiere, an enormous posterior distended by an overstretched thong, rouged cheeks, and a crudely-lipsticked mouth, calling out to an apparently disinterested [sic] brown bear half her size, 'COME HURR AND LOVE MEEEE!'"
Now some lucky federal judge gets to sort this mess out.
Listing image by The Oatmeal/Matthew Ingram
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