For the Sake of Science

Matthew Inman is the creator of the wonderful site TheOatmeal. He routinely makes hilarious, intelligent comics and that’s why he’s one of the three comic-based websites I have in my bookmarks (the other two are memebase.com and xkcd.com). He has recently found himself in a bit of legal trouble from the horribly ugly, punch-me-in-the-balls-so-I-don’t-feel-the-pain-in-my-eyes-anymore website FunnyJunk.com. Apparently he complained awhile ago about how much of his material the website had stolen. He got a fundamentally dishonest response, but basically moved on from there. As he said:

I realize that trying to police copyright infringement on the internet is like strolling into the Vietnamese jungle circa 1964 and politely asking everyone to use squirt guns. I know that if FunnyJunk disappeared fifty other clones would pop up to take its place overnight, but I felt I had to say something about what they’re doing.

Fast forward a year and FunnyJunk still hasn’t let things go. (That reminds me of someone.) Now they want $20,000 in damages. Take a look at the website. (It’s in image form, so I can’t just copy and paste excerpts. And I’m too lazy to type it all out by hand.) It’s one of my favorite responses to anything ever. In fact, I think it’s only second to Richard Lenksi’s slapping around of Conservapedia.

For people too lazy to click links, here’s the summary: Inman tore apart the details of the threatening letter he received, drew a picture of the owner’s mother seducing a Kodiak bear, then asked for $20,000 in donations so he could take a picture of it to send to FunnyJunk’s lawyer before donating the money to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

via theoatmeal.com. Because citation is not that difficult.

So how has the donation request been working for Inman? Let’s see:

Monday afternoon, he posted to Facebook that his fundraising campaign reached $20,000 in just 64 minutes. At the time this blog post was published, donations had almost reached $53,000 with over 3,700 funders.

And how about now? He’s nearing $113,000. It’s been about 21 hours as of now and he has 15 days left of fundraising to go. I think he’s earned the last word:

I’m hoping that philanthropy trumps douchebaggery and greed.

Filed under: Humor | Tagged: FunnyJunk, Mattew Inman, TheOatmeal |