Stop Digging ⇥ digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com

As I’m sure you’re aware, a lawyer representing FunnyJunk.com sent Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal a letter demanding a cheque for $20,000 to prevent him filing a lawsuit. Why? Because Inman wrote an article noting that FunnyJunk was stealing his comics and re-hosting them without attribution while gaining ad revenue.

FunnyJunk removed a number of those comics, and is claiming that Inman is falsely accusing them of copyright infringement. But Inman notes that the article is both old, and that FunnyJunk is still infringing copyright by hosting his content. In essence, FunnyJunk wants Inman to pay for his own comics to be copied.

Inman thought this was ridiculous, so he set up a campaign to raise $10,000 each for the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society. As of writing, the campaign has raised over $160,000 to be split equally between the two.

FunnyJunk‘s lawyer won’t be having that though:

When I reached out to FunnyJunk’s lawyer, Charles Carreon, to discuss the situation, he explained that he’d removed his contact information from his website due to the large number of people who’d contacted him after Inman’s blog post went online. […]

[H]e believes Inman’s fundraiser to be a violation of the terms of service of IndieGoGo, the website being used to collect donations, and has sent a request to disable the fundraising campaign. (The fundraising website has only responded with an automated message so far.)

What a dick.