Yesterday, we wrote about the brilliant webcomic The Oatmeal, its clever founder Matthew Inman, and the rather ballstastic move by website FunnyJunk in suing Inman and his tiny web-brand essentially because FunnyJunk hosts or has hosted The Oatmeal’s comics without attribution.
If you’re not a regular reader of The Oatmeal (we can almost guarantee you will be if you click through to the site from this post), here’s a quick recap. Across the web, there are sites to which users upload memes and funny content, and subsequently, said content gets passed around like your mom on Tuesday nights at the bowling alley.
Sites like this often make garbage trucks full of money via the hard work of webcomics like The Oatmeal, which indirectly basically siphons ad revenue from the artists who make it, reappropriating it to these re-hosting sites. Uncool, right?
Inman doesn’t dig when people steal his Oatmeal content, but he’s not a dick about it. He did lash out at one alleged offender, FunnyJunk, who counters that since users upload content, the site isn’t stealing it and that they make every effort to root out other people’s content and take it down. That was about a year ago.
So Monday, The Oatmeal added a new post about how FunnyJunk is trying, via a lawyer, to shake down the one-dude operation for $20,000, which considering the reason Inman mocked them in the first place, is kind of adding insult to injury.
After relentlessly ripping holes in the lawyer’s logic, The Oatmeal states an intention to raise the twenty-thousand clams, but instead of lining the pockets of someone he considers a horrible content thief, splitting the proceeds between a cancer charity and an animal one.
The cool part is, as we said yesterday, fans of The Oatmeal have ponied up- and while that number was impressive yesterday (the goal was reached in just over an hour), now that amount is just shy of $100,000 . By the time you read this, it will probably have exceeded that goal.
You can watch the progress in The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk here .
