The Oatmeal creates original comic artwork with an admittedly caustic sense of humor. Meanwhile, Funnyjunk is an online repository of anything funny, reposted by its users.
In other words, while The Oatmeal creates content, Funnyjunk replicates it; these are two opposingly different business models.
A while ago, The Oatmeal owner discovered a large number of his own comic creations posted on Funnyjunk, without any attribution or his permission.
Says The Oatmeal about the ordeal:
“And it’s not just FunnyJunk.com, there’s a small army of sites out there like this whose business model runs this way. […] It seems like this “Host-stolen-content-until-someone-complains-meanwhile-earning-ad-revenue” business model is booming right now. It’s basically the new Ebaumsworld.“
After calling the Funnyjunk owners out, they responded with a mass email bombing of his account from thousands of enraged Funnyjunk members, who were told that The Oatmeal was after their livelihood.
Eventually, the copyrighted Oatmeal files were taken down from Funnyjunk; apparently not in their entirety, so The Oatmeal continued to pester Funnyjunk.
The latter has now hired the services of attorney Charles Carreon, who is famous for the Sex.com case: he assisted with the return of the domain Sex.com to Kremen, after Cohen stole it.
Attorney Charles Carreon has now sent a Cease and Desist letter to The Oatmeal, demanding monetary compensation of $20,000 for alleged defamation his client sustained, among other things.
This looks like a complete mess as Funnyjunk does not seem to get it’s in the wrong and The Oatmeal appears determined to battle it out; its goal of collecting $20,000 in donations was surpassed, with the current amount standing at more than $120,000 dollars!
Many thanks to domain developer, Tia Wood, for providing us with leads to this story.
