10 ms·

FunnyJunk lawyer to subpoena Twitter, Ars Technica

131 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nicholassmith 14y ago
I can fully guarantee this is going the Jack Thompson route, and he'll continue to waste court time, money and patience up until a judge finally goes "License to law, revoked" and kicks him out. He's got himself stuck in an infinite loop where each time something happens he feels more and more obliged to beef up the threat.
- brian_cloutier 14y ago
  When a comment of yours is marked dead, that's typically not an invitation to immediately make the same comment verbatim.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    You get "dead" on a dupe submit (happens periodically with me - not sure why) - not just down voting.
    - brian_cloutier 14y ago
      Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks.
    - wglb 14y ago
      I have had it happen when hitting the reply button gives you "expired link". If you refresh the page, then post, you will notice that the first post actually took, and the second one is marked dead.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    When a comment has clearly been double posted by accident that's not an invitation to make a snarky comment.
- tptacek 14y ago
  I'd be willing to put money against that. Both Thompson and Carreon (FJ's lawyer) appear to be delusional about the merits of the causes they're putting in front of the court. But Thompson also appears to be delusional about reality and his role in it: he submitted repeated filings to the court that were laden with cartoons, images, pictures of people he believed were persecuting him, and tirades against the court itself. He did that after being repeatedly warned by the court not to deliver more filings. He did that while one of his previous filings was currently being considered; instead of waiting for a response for the court, he continued to send them additional filings. Here, I'll just let the Florida Supreme Court describe it: Thompson has submitted over fifty filings directly with this Court, all of which have either been forwarded to the referee, dismissed, or denied. Additionally, Thompson’s most recent filings are repetitive, frivolous, and, like his earlier ones, insulting to the Court. One of Thompson’s recent filings contains what Thompson refers to as a “children’s picture book for adults” that rehashes his previous arguments in illustrated form which he states was necessary due to “the Court’s inability to comprehend” his arguments. Between the text of the motion, Thompson pasted images depicting swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word "SLAP!" written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, keys, and a house of cards, and the motion concludes with a photograph of the cover of Thompson’s book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson therefore appears to have engaged in the legal equivalent of setting himself on fire in front of the building. Carreon is apparently abusing the California legal system, but he's doing it (to date) like a sniper, not like an suicidal schizophrenic street prophet.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Very true, but Thompson at first wasn't all out crazy like a bag of snakes at first. It was as the situation spiralled we got the full crazy.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
evilbit 14y ago
carreon v. the internet. mr carreon is clearly intent on leaving his mark on the history of internet. a skid mark, perhaps, but mark no less.
debacle 14y ago
I wonder how this will reflect on FunnyJunk in the future.
- mrgoldenbrown 14y ago
  People that use FunnyJunk may not care. It was already full of non attributed, obviously stolen content, but some people still patronized it. In fact it seems as though many people passionately defended it at various times!
  - praptak 14y ago
    The internet crowds might cheer you on when you grab content without attribution, but being litigious is pitchforks and torches to you, especially when it is against freedom of expression on the internet.
grassclip 14y ago
"It might not have seemed very dehumanizing when Walt Disney made Japanese people look silly with buck teeth and big glasses who could not pronounce their 'R's or their 'L's," he said. "But it was dehumanizing, and the purpose was to direct evil intentions against them, which ultimately resulted in the only nuclear holocaust that ever occurred in the history of humanity. I don't think Truman would have ever done that if we hadn't so dehumanized the enemy. When you dehumanize someone, that is the first step to inciting people." Ha. He claims that Disney was the reason the U.S. dropped the nuclear bombs. Interesting analogy.
- riffraff 14y ago
  read more carefully, he uses disney as an example, but then he says _we_ (americans) have dehumanized the enemy. While i find this completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, he may have a bit of a point on that.
  - bicknergseng 14y ago
    Every war time country dehumanizes their enemies. If we portrayed the Taliban or Vietcong as freedom fighters saving children from American boots or the Nazis portrayed the Jews as hardworking members of society, the surrounding events would have been much different. That said, I'm quite certain Disney's cartoons had absolutely nothing... NOTHING... to do with HST's decision to drop the bombs. Furthermore, the poor analogy has an obscure correlation at best with the current lawsuit.
    - sageikosa 14y ago
      Anecdotally, I seem to remember reading that HST loved the movie Dumbo, so he probably was a pretty big Disney fanboy. Regardless, the L/R phonetic collision in CJK languages as portrayed in movies probably wasn't the main reason for building and dropping the bomb. Probably more to do with the sheer grisly nature of the Solomon Islands and Papau New Guinea campaigns, and a desire not to repeat it.
      - 14y ago
fatman 14y ago
Carreon is in on it, and is just intentionally creating some buzz to drum up donations to some worthy causes. Well played.
- RobMcCullough 14y ago
  Ooh, and the plot thickens! Just when I thought there could be no happy ending to this story!
chime 14y ago
While I'm on the side of TheOatMeal on this one, I wouldn't be so quick to defend someone signing up as @Charles_Carreon on Twitter. That person impersonated the lawyer during a very sensitive time and negatively changed public view, even if later Twitter suspended the account. It's not parody, it's impersonation. I can't create a fake account 'pg[invisible-unicode-character]' here and start posting things like "I wish dhouston would just sell Dropbox to Apple already." That's not acceptable, regardless of whether the person being impersonated is loved or hated by all.
- warfangle 14y ago
  Apparently most of what he was doing was just linking to CC's press interviews. According to TFA, at least.
  - chime 14y ago
    You just need one line to change public opinion. I myself fell for the following line when I saw it last week: > "You sir, are a dumbass. I am doing what any sane individual would do." I saw it linked somewhere, briefly glanced at it, thought "wow, this guy's not fit to be anyone's lawyer", and moved on. I didn't have time or desire to dig into it to find out if it was really him or not. This article has managed to salvage some of that but I doubt everyone who saw the impersonated tweet will learn about the truth. It's really no different from being labelled "Arrested for XYZ" by the media and then being proven 100% guilt-free. Even if the media redacts the stories or posts new information, the damage is already done in most cases.
    - ceejayoz 14y ago
      > I saw it linked somewhere, briefly glanced at it, thought "wow, this guy's not fit to be anyone's lawyer", and moved on. In fairness, the real guy's public statements have had the same effect. I'm not sure a parody account can really be said to have affected the guy's reputation, it's already about as tanked as can be.
- crazygringo 14y ago
solox3 14y ago
Not sure where this is going. Isn't there a law that persecutes lawyers wanting to abuse the law for personal gain?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bicknergseng 14y ago
Wait.... did Carreon just try to blame the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Walt Disney?
- sageikosa 14y ago
  collect
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- vacri 14y ago
  He was saying that dehumanising speech contributed to it. And he's somewhat correct. The funny thing is that he is equating what's happening to him to the nuclear holocausts with his serious face on. It's been overlooked a little, but in the article they juxtapose him saying "I always speak respectfully and never use even soft curse words" with his actual website with parodies using exactly what he says he doesn't.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    It's possible he didn't write any of that material on that website.
    - vacri 14y ago
      It is indeed possible, but whether he wrote it or not is a bit irrelevant given that he claims he wrote it - the page has 'by Charles Carreon' just above the 'tits and rice' graphic. http://www.american-buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZA http://www.american-buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZ...
engtech 14y ago
I wonder what would happen if everyone started calling him that "funny, junk lawyer"
- SimHacker 14y ago
  Reminds me of Brad Templeton, who moderated rec.humor.funny, and had a usenet address like utzoo!watmath!looking!brad -- so he was known as the "funny looking guy"!
jfoutz 14y ago
Lets try to ruin lives over imaginary internet points! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_law
- derleth 14y ago
  Fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law (Your link really doesn't lead anywhere useful. Try it.)
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I wonder how hard it would be to make mediawiki automatically redirect in cases like this. From what I've heard of mediawiki's code.. probably very. Oh well.
    - officemonkey 14y ago
      Not hard at all: #REDIRECT [[Sayre's law]]
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Well of course. Somebody has done that now for that page it seems, but the general problem still exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable redirects when pages don't exist.
        ars 14y ago
        It doesn't even need to redirect - it could just automatically include some search results if the page doesn't exist.
        officemonkey 14y ago
        >The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable redirects when pages don't exist. Mediawiki does do it automatically, it's called having many thousands of users.
seanalltogether 14y ago
I think it's really important to point out that Inman never directed his attack toward Carreon personally, it was all directed toward the letter, which FunnyJunk is responsible for. The only point of the blog post that is directed personally towards Carreon is in the beginning. >The owner of FunnyJunk hired Charles Carreon, a lawyer who became famous in the 90s after successfully litigating sex.com. Charles does a bit of modeling too, apparently.
grellas 14y ago
If I am a boxing manager sitting at the corner of the ring to encourage my guy during the fight, I don't do him a good service by leaping into it and taking wild swings at the opposing fighter, or at the ref, or at any crazy person from the crowd who also happens to want to jump in spoiling for a brawl. The result in such a case is not likely to bode well for either me or my fighter and I stand a good chance of being made to look ridiculous in the process. In a sense, like the manager above, Mr. Carreon has thrown himself personally into a fight that was not his fight but that of his client. He has made it personal and now finds himself suing in spray-gun fashion hoping to hit the nearest target connected with the events, whether the law supports him strongly, feebly, or perhaps not at all - all the while standing forth in a public spotlight that magnifies his every action whether good, bad, or indifferent. There is no winning for him in that situation, whatever the merits of his claims. The most valuable asset of a lawyer is his reputation. I won't presume to tell Mr. Carreon how best to defend his but, whatever else he does, he needs to be very careful not to exacerbate a situation that already is very difficult for him. Whatever wrong may have been done to him, the solution does not lie in a lawsuit of the type that has been filed here.
- lmkg 14y ago
  Should/can Funny Junk fire Carreon at this point for his foolish behavior? If they do so, how much does Carreon's own cases depend on his relationship with Funny Junk, and what are the consequences? If I were FJ I would be pretty pissed, because Carreon is using FJ's case for his own personal benefit, and in so doing is dragging his client's name into a potential second shitstorm above and beyond the first one they already signed up for. I'm curious how that relationship will pan out, and what alternatives are available to each party.
  - alttab 14y ago
    And even more hilarious if FunkyJunk sues him for tarnishing their site's reputation by acting like an idiot on their behalf.
  - JackC 14y ago
    Yeah, you can (just about) always fire your lawyer. The right to have the lawyer of your choosing -- or not -- is pretty fundamental. If they're working on a contingency ("I get X% of anything we recover"), you'll have to pay them a fair hourly rate for the work they've already done. (Incidentally, this makes it pretty tough to hold lawyers to non-compete agreements, because their clients have a right to keep working with them even if they switch firms.) Now, whether FunnyJunk likes or doesn't like the publicity this is bringing them is a separate question. You got me on that one.
slavak 14y ago
As to who the person was, Carreon had some ideas: it was someone "incited by Inman, or in the alternative and on information and belief, Inman himself." Isn't this by itself libel? EDIT: Formatting.
pwg 14y ago
Those who fail to learn from the Streisand Effect [1] are doomed to repeat it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

131 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

I can fully guarantee this is going the Jack Thompson route, and he'll continue to waste court time, money and patience up until a judge finally goes "License to law, revoked" and kicks him out. He's got himself stuck in an infinite loop where each time something happens he feels more and more obliged to beef up the threat.

brian_cloutier 14y ago
When a comment of yours is marked dead, that's typically not an invitation to immediately make the same comment verbatim.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  You get "dead" on a dupe submit (happens periodically with me - not sure why) - not just down voting.
  - brian_cloutier 14y ago
    Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks.
  - wglb 14y ago
    I have had it happen when hitting the reply button gives you "expired link". If you refresh the page, then post, you will notice that the first post actually took, and the second one is marked dead.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  When a comment has clearly been double posted by accident that's not an invitation to make a snarky comment.
tptacek 14y ago
I'd be willing to put money against that. Both Thompson and Carreon (FJ's lawyer) appear to be delusional about the merits of the causes they're putting in front of the court. But Thompson also appears to be delusional about reality and his role in it: he submitted repeated filings to the court that were laden with cartoons, images, pictures of people he believed were persecuting him, and tirades against the court itself. He did that after being repeatedly warned by the court not to deliver more filings. He did that while one of his previous filings was currently being considered; instead of waiting for a response for the court, he continued to send them additional filings. Here, I'll just let the Florida Supreme Court describe it: Thompson has submitted over fifty filings directly with this Court, all of which have either been forwarded to the referee, dismissed, or denied. Additionally, Thompson’s most recent filings are repetitive, frivolous, and, like his earlier ones, insulting to the Court. One of Thompson’s recent filings contains what Thompson refers to as a “children’s picture book for adults” that rehashes his previous arguments in illustrated form which he states was necessary due to “the Court’s inability to comprehend” his arguments. Between the text of the motion, Thompson pasted images depicting swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word "SLAP!" written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, keys, and a house of cards, and the motion concludes with a photograph of the cover of Thompson’s book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson therefore appears to have engaged in the legal equivalent of setting himself on fire in front of the building. Carreon is apparently abusing the California legal system, but he's doing it (to date) like a sniper, not like an suicidal schizophrenic street prophet.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Very true, but Thompson at first wasn't all out crazy like a bag of snakes at first. It was as the situation spiralled we got the full crazy.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

evilbit 14y ago

carreon v. the internet. mr carreon is clearly intent on leaving his mark on the history of internet. a skid mark, perhaps, but mark no less.

debacle 14y ago

I wonder how this will reflect on FunnyJunk in the future.

mrgoldenbrown 14y ago
People that use FunnyJunk may not care. It was already full of non attributed, obviously stolen content, but some people still patronized it. In fact it seems as though many people passionately defended it at various times!
- praptak 14y ago
  The internet crowds might cheer you on when you grab content without attribution, but being litigious is pitchforks and torches to you, especially when it is against freedom of expression on the internet.

grassclip 14y ago

"It might not have seemed very dehumanizing when Walt Disney made Japanese people look silly with buck teeth and big glasses who could not pronounce their 'R's or their 'L's," he said. "But it was dehumanizing, and the purpose was to direct evil intentions against them, which ultimately resulted in the only nuclear holocaust that ever occurred in the history of humanity. I don't think Truman would have ever done that if we hadn't so dehumanized the enemy. When you dehumanize someone, that is the first step to inciting people." Ha. He claims that Disney was the reason the U.S. dropped the nuclear bombs. Interesting analogy.

riffraff 14y ago
read more carefully, he uses disney as an example, but then he says _we_ (americans) have dehumanized the enemy. While i find this completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, he may have a bit of a point on that.
- bicknergseng 14y ago
  Every war time country dehumanizes their enemies. If we portrayed the Taliban or Vietcong as freedom fighters saving children from American boots or the Nazis portrayed the Jews as hardworking members of society, the surrounding events would have been much different. That said, I'm quite certain Disney's cartoons had absolutely nothing... NOTHING... to do with HST's decision to drop the bombs. Furthermore, the poor analogy has an obscure correlation at best with the current lawsuit.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    Anecdotally, I seem to remember reading that HST loved the movie Dumbo, so he probably was a pretty big Disney fanboy. Regardless, the L/R phonetic collision in CJK languages as portrayed in movies probably wasn't the main reason for building and dropping the bomb. Probably more to do with the sheer grisly nature of the Solomon Islands and Papau New Guinea campaigns, and a desire not to repeat it.
    - 14y ago

fatman 14y ago

Carreon is in on it, and is just intentionally creating some buzz to drum up donations to some worthy causes. Well played.

RobMcCullough 14y ago
Ooh, and the plot thickens! Just when I thought there could be no happy ending to this story!

chime 14y ago

While I'm on the side of TheOatMeal on this one, I wouldn't be so quick to defend someone signing up as @Charles_Carreon on Twitter. That person impersonated the lawyer during a very sensitive time and negatively changed public view, even if later Twitter suspended the account. It's not parody, it's impersonation. I can't create a fake account 'pg[invisible-unicode-character]' here and start posting things like "I wish dhouston would just sell Dropbox to Apple already." That's not acceptable, regardless of whether the person being impersonated is loved or hated by all.

warfangle 14y ago
Apparently most of what he was doing was just linking to CC's press interviews. According to TFA, at least.
- chime 14y ago
  You just need one line to change public opinion. I myself fell for the following line when I saw it last week: > "You sir, are a dumbass. I am doing what any sane individual would do." I saw it linked somewhere, briefly glanced at it, thought "wow, this guy's not fit to be anyone's lawyer", and moved on. I didn't have time or desire to dig into it to find out if it was really him or not. This article has managed to salvage some of that but I doubt everyone who saw the impersonated tweet will learn about the truth. It's really no different from being labelled "Arrested for XYZ" by the media and then being proven 100% guilt-free. Even if the media redacts the stories or posts new information, the damage is already done in most cases.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    > I saw it linked somewhere, briefly glanced at it, thought "wow, this guy's not fit to be anyone's lawyer", and moved on. In fairness, the real guy's public statements have had the same effect. I'm not sure a parody account can really be said to have affected the guy's reputation, it's already about as tanked as can be.
crazygringo 14y ago

solox3 14y ago

Not sure where this is going. Isn't there a law that persecutes lawyers wanting to abuse the law for personal gain?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bicknergseng 14y ago

Wait.... did Carreon just try to blame the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Walt Disney?

sageikosa 14y ago
collect
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
vacri 14y ago
He was saying that dehumanising speech contributed to it. And he's somewhat correct. The funny thing is that he is equating what's happening to him to the nuclear holocausts with his serious face on. It's been overlooked a little, but in the article they juxtapose him saying "I always speak respectfully and never use even soft curse words" with his actual website with parodies using exactly what he says he doesn't.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  It's possible he didn't write any of that material on that website.
  - vacri 14y ago
    It is indeed possible, but whether he wrote it or not is a bit irrelevant given that he claims he wrote it - the page has 'by Charles Carreon' just above the 'tits and rice' graphic. http://www.american-buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZA http://www.american-buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZ...

engtech 14y ago

I wonder what would happen if everyone started calling him that "funny, junk lawyer"

SimHacker 14y ago
Reminds me of Brad Templeton, who moderated rec.humor.funny, and had a usenet address like utzoo!watmath!looking!brad -- so he was known as the "funny looking guy"!

jfoutz 14y ago

Lets try to ruin lives over imaginary internet points! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_law

derleth 14y ago
Fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law (Your link really doesn't lead anywhere useful. Try it.)
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I wonder how hard it would be to make mediawiki automatically redirect in cases like this. From what I've heard of mediawiki's code.. probably very. Oh well.
  - officemonkey 14y ago
    Not hard at all: #REDIRECT [[Sayre's law]]
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Well of course. Somebody has done that now for that page it seems, but the general problem still exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable redirects when pages don't exist.
      - ars 14y ago
        It doesn't even need to redirect - it could just automatically include some search results if the page doesn't exist.
      - officemonkey 14y ago
        >The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable redirects when pages don't exist. Mediawiki does do it automatically, it's called having many thousands of users.

seanalltogether 14y ago

I think it's really important to point out that Inman never directed his attack toward Carreon personally, it was all directed toward the letter, which FunnyJunk is responsible for. The only point of the blog post that is directed personally towards Carreon is in the beginning. >The owner of FunnyJunk hired Charles Carreon, a lawyer who became famous in the 90s after successfully litigating sex.com. Charles does a bit of modeling too, apparently.

grellas 14y ago

If I am a boxing manager sitting at the corner of the ring to encourage my guy during the fight, I don't do him a good service by leaping into it and taking wild swings at the opposing fighter, or at the ref, or at any crazy person from the crowd who also happens to want to jump in spoiling for a brawl. The result in such a case is not likely to bode well for either me or my fighter and I stand a good chance of being made to look ridiculous in the process. In a sense, like the manager above, Mr. Carreon has thrown himself personally into a fight that was not his fight but that of his client. He has made it personal and now finds himself suing in spray-gun fashion hoping to hit the nearest target connected with the events, whether the law supports him strongly, feebly, or perhaps not at all - all the while standing forth in a public spotlight that magnifies his every action whether good, bad, or indifferent. There is no winning for him in that situation, whatever the merits of his claims. The most valuable asset of a lawyer is his reputation. I won't presume to tell Mr. Carreon how best to defend his but, whatever else he does, he needs to be very careful not to exacerbate a situation that already is very difficult for him. Whatever wrong may have been done to him, the solution does not lie in a lawsuit of the type that has been filed here.

lmkg 14y ago
Should/can Funny Junk fire Carreon at this point for his foolish behavior? If they do so, how much does Carreon's own cases depend on his relationship with Funny Junk, and what are the consequences? If I were FJ I would be pretty pissed, because Carreon is using FJ's case for his own personal benefit, and in so doing is dragging his client's name into a potential second shitstorm above and beyond the first one they already signed up for. I'm curious how that relationship will pan out, and what alternatives are available to each party.
- alttab 14y ago
  And even more hilarious if FunkyJunk sues him for tarnishing their site's reputation by acting like an idiot on their behalf.
- JackC 14y ago
  Yeah, you can (just about) always fire your lawyer. The right to have the lawyer of your choosing -- or not -- is pretty fundamental. If they're working on a contingency ("I get X% of anything we recover"), you'll have to pay them a fair hourly rate for the work they've already done. (Incidentally, this makes it pretty tough to hold lawyers to non-compete agreements, because their clients have a right to keep working with them even if they switch firms.) Now, whether FunnyJunk likes or doesn't like the publicity this is bringing them is a separate question. You got me on that one.

slavak 14y ago

As to who the person was, Carreon had some ideas: it was someone "incited by Inman, or in the alternative and on information and belief, Inman himself." Isn't this by itself libel? EDIT: Formatting.

pwg 14y ago

Those who fail to learn from the Streisand Effect [1] are doomed to repeat it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect