Awesome comics site TheOatmeal gets sued by website accused of stealing its content. (Yes, you read that right.)

by Mike Hansen

The Oatmeal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is effed up on so many levels.

Matthew Inman, the creator of the terrific webcomic site, TheOatmeal.com, accused another site called FunnyJunk of allowing his comics to be reposted on its monetized site – In other words, FunnyJunk is making money off Inman without permission.

Now, I get sharing funny pictures online – everybody does it – but the big difference here appears to be that FunnyJunk has hundreds of The Oatmeal comics copied on its site, which makes money off others’ content. Inman complained about it in a blog post last year. Now FunnyJunk’s lawyer is threatening him with a federal lawsuit unless he coughs up $20,000. BuWhat?

Now Inman has posted the full attorney’s letter, with his hilarious response – he’s going to raise that 20 large, but not to give to FunnyJunk: he’s giving it to charity and rubbing his internet love in FunnyJunk’s face. Or, as he puts it,

Instead of mailing the owner of FunnyJunk the money, I’m going to send the above drawing of his mother.  I’m going to try and raise $20,000 and instead send it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

In my opinion, what FunnyJunk is doing is despicable. I think this is worth sharing with as many people as possible.

Since this is in the process of blowing up on the internet, The Oatmeal is loading pretty slowly right now. Either that, or the forces of evil are launching a DNS attack on it. But it’s well worth checking out. In the meantime, here’s The Oatmeal’s Wikipedia page.

Here’s a site that does it right: the newly launched Comic Rocket, which doesn’t scrape content from other sites, and from which every view counts as the original site’s traffic. That’s how it’s done, son.

JUSTICE!

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