FunnyJunk Attorney Charles Carreon Drops Lawsuit Against Oatmeal Creator

Charles Carreon, the attorney with the the infamous lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, has withdrawn the suit.

The news was announced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which also posted Inman’s “notice of voluntary dismissal“. (I would embed the document below, but there’s basically no text, aside from “plaintiff dismisses the action.”) The EFF was representing Inman in the lawsuit, and the announcement included this statement from Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl:

“Matthew Inman spoke out against Carreon’s threat of a frivolous lawsuit, in a very popular and very public way. This was nothing more than a meritless attempt to punish Inman for calling attention to his legal bullying. We called him out on this in our briefs, so it’s no surprise that Carreon was left with no choice but to dismiss.”

The dispute originated after Carreon, representing the website FunnyJunk, sued Inman over a year-old blog post where he criticized FunnyJunk for hosting copies of his cartoons without links or credit. Carreon asked for $20,000 in damages and demanded that Inman remove all mention of FunnyJunk from his website. Instead, Inman posted Carreon’s letter, drew a cartoon depicting Carreon’s mother having sex with a bear, and raised $20,000 on Indiegogo for the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. Then things got weird, with Carreon suing Inman on his own behalf, and asking the court to hold up the charitable donations because of the tax write off that Inman would supposedly earn.

As I noted earlier, the Carreon’s most recent filing does not include an explanation for his withdrawal. Meanwhile, the contact page of his website has been disabled, allegedly due to “security attacks instigated by Matt Inman”, so we can only speculate as to why his reasonings and future plans. It may be, as the EFF says, that Carreon decided that he has no case. It may also be that he was finally tired of the barrage of insults and criticism — as you can imagine, none of this (plus the fact that Inman has a formidable online presence) made him very popular.