What a difference a few weeks – and a few thousand tweets – make. Charles Carreon, the attorney who poked a hornet’s nest with a stick when he filed a crazy reckless inexplicable flawed infamous lawsuit against Matthew Inman (of The Oatmeal), Indiegogo and two popular charities (National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society), has pulled his lawsuit.
In case you missed here’s the quick version: Inman is an artist and the creator of a popular website called The Oatmeal. Inman found that some of his creations were being used without his permission on a web site called FunnyJunk.com and complained about it on his site in a typically “Oatmeal” sort of way (with a cartoon). In response, Charles Carreon sent Inman a letter demanding $20,000 to compensate the owners for what he characterized as defamation. Inman was outraged by the demand and turned the spat on its heels by creating a campaign on the site Indiegogo to raise that same $20,000 for charity. Days later, as support for Inman increased, Carreon filed a perplexing lawsuit (pro se, meaning on his own and not on behalf of a client) against Inman, Indiegogo, and the charities alleging all sorts of impropriety. You can imagine the reaction that got on the internet.
Eventually, Carreon cried uncle, filing a notice of dismissal in the lawsuit (note: Popehat also has a link to the filing). Carreon didn’t elaborate as to the reasons for the dismissal though many of us in the legal community have a pretty good idea (hint: the nice version rhymes with “cad midea”).
I can’t even begin to understand what motivated Carreon to make such noise over this matter. Maybe he wanted to be a little internet famous in which case, “Mission accomplished” – for all of the wrong reasons.
I’m sure this makes Inman’s lawyer, Venkat Balasubramani (and a super great guy to have coffee with if you happen to find yourself in Seattle) pretty happy.
It’s also good news for Indiegogo, the site that hosted Inman’s charity drive. Slava Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Indiegogo, issued this statement about the news:
Indiegogo is pleased to see this lawsuit has been dropped. The money raised on Matthew Inman’s “Bear Love Good. Cancer Bad” campaign has been disbursed to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation. Indiegogo exists to provide crowdfunding opportunities for any and all types of creative, cause-related and entrepreneurial campaigns and is committed to supporting the more than 6,000 campaigns actively raising money on Indiegogo.
So with that, it looks like the case is closed… for now. It’s important to note that a notice of dismissal filed without prejudice means that the suit could be resurrected. Let’s hope that common sense prevails and that doesn’t happen.
