Funnyjunk Lawyer Being Mocked Mercilessly, Makes Things Worse By Trying To Shut Down The Oatmeal's Fundraiser

from the stop-digging dept

As the famous saying goes, when you are in a hole, stop digging. Someone might want to send that message to lawyer Charles Carreon, who has (legitimately) worked on some good cases in the past. However, for reasons that are confusing even his friends, he seems to be trying to respond to a big mistake by hinting at an even bigger one. As you have probably heard -- since it's all over the freaking internet -- there's a little fight going on between funny webcomic site The Oatmeal (and its creator Matthew Inman) and the not very funny aggregator of things that people claim are funny site, Funnyjunk. You can read our take on the mess, if you'd like.

The summary version is that Inman got annoyed at people posting his comics on Funnyjunk and spoke out publicly about it (to be honest, his statements seemed to be an overreaction and include lots of silly statements about "stealing" that aren't particularly accurate). However, he was clear that he had no interest in suing or using the law at all. He just wanted to speak his mind and shame the site. Funnyjunk overreacted back... and then waited a while before doubling (or perhaps tripling) down on its overreaction by hiring Carreon to send Inman a letter threatening a lawsuit on a bunch of claims, nearly all of which appear to be totally bogus (the defamation claim is the main one, which is simply ridiculous, but there's also an absolutely crazy trademark claim that seems to suggest that Inman's opinion of Funnyjunk is "false advertising"), as well as demanding $20,000. Inman then responded in true internet fashion, by posting the letter with his thoughts interspersed and (most importantly) setting up a fundraiser at IndieGogo to try to raise $20,000, not to pay off Funnyjunk, but to donate to charity. And it came included with a marginally NSFW drawing involving a mother (apparently "Funnyjunk's") and a bear. You've probably seen it by now.

Anyway, somewhere along the way the Streisand Effect took over, and the whole thing went viral. Now, as we've learned in previous Streisand Effect situations, this is the point at which the person who overreacted begins to recognize how badly they screwed up and how they've made things a lot worse. And then they apologize and grovel or something along those lines -- and we chalk up another hash mark on the big scoreboard on the internet showing how social pressure and the court of public opinion can keep excessive legal threats in check.

But, of course, there are always some people who can't stop digging. In fact, I would guess that the people who often find themselves on the wrong end of the Streisand Effect are probably slightly more prone to excessive-digging in response to said Effect, because the type of person who doesn't really know the Streisand Effect is about to hit them is likely the kind of person who doesn't realize that continuing to dig doesn't get one out of a hole.

And, here, it appears that Carreon has failed to stop digging. He spoke to MSNBC and said a few things so stupid that he might want to have someone who is more internet native act as a filter prior to talking to the press in the future about these sorts of things. Here's the big one:

He also explains that he believes Inman's fundraiser to be a violation of the terms of service of IndieGoGo, the website being used to collect donations, and has sent a request to disable the fundraising campaign. (The fundraising website has only responded with an automated message so far.)

"I don't think that what I did was unreasonable," Carreon says while discussing the initial demands sent to Inman. He tells me that while this situation is unique, he is typically open to negotiation. He ended the conversation with a promise to keep me updated on how things are resolved and on whether he takes any legal action against the folks who have been harassing him since Inman's "BearLove Good Cancer Bad" fundraising campaign started.

Yes. A large portion of the internet hates you... and your response is to threaten to shut down a massively successful fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society? Really? Is that really the smartest response to the situation?

Then there's this:

"I'm completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat -- I've never really seen it before," Carreon explains.

Indeed, I don't think anyone is quite familiar with the full extent of Inman's response, but for a lawyer who plays up his connections to various internet-related lawsuits, you would think Carreon would have, perhaps, spent some time on the internet. And the internet, in general, is not a fan of bogus legal threats. There's a pretty long history of that, and it shouldn't have been that hard to predict that this threat would backfire.

Either way, as another day goes by, one hopes that Carreon's more level-headed friends will suggest that it may be time to ditch the shovel.

Filed Under: charles carreon, matthew inman, streisand effect, the oatmeal
Companies: funnyjunk, indiegogo

Labatt Threatens To Sue Newspaper For Showing Photo of Suspected Killer Holding Its Beer

from the ip-rights-gone-insane dept

If you follow the news for gruesome murders, you're probably well aware of Luka Magnotta, the Canadian who's been accused of killing Lin Jun -- filming the entire thing (and posting it online), then dismembering the body, eating some of it, and sending parts of it to various political offices (separately, he was also accused of making a series of videos in which he tortures and kills cats). Either way, he's become something of a news sensation -- and after a relatively short manhunt, was tracked down and arrested in Berlin. All of that, of course, has nothing to do with stuff that we normally talk about here.

However, as David Canton alerts us, Canadian beer giant Labatt Breweries is now threatening to sue the Montreal Gazette, because in reporting on this story, the Gazette used a photo of Magnotta, showing him holding a bottle of Labatt Blue:

“As I am sure you can understand, this image is highly denigrating to our brand, and we are disturbed that this image remains on your site despite repeated requests and the many images available of this person,” Karyn Sullivan, Labatt’s associate general counsel, wrote in a letter to the Gazette.

Of course, as even the article about this explains, Labatt is "exacerbating the damage" by not just mentioning it, but threatening to sue to get the picture taken down. There's simply no legitimate legal issue here. As the Gazette properly pointed out in response: "The image originally appeared on Magnotta's personal Facebook page and on his blog and thus is newsworthy. There is no connection made between the brand and the suspect in the accompanying caption, headline or news story."

Except that, now that Labatt has threatened to sue, there is a connection. If someone at Labatt had simply understood the very basics of the Streisand Effect, they would have known better. It seems like perhaps Labatt should spend a bit more time hiring better lawyers, rather than worrying about a photo of an accused killer drinking its beer.

Filed Under: canada, luka magnotta, streisand effect, trademark
Companies: labatt breweries, montreal gazette

Blog Fight Devolves Into Legal Nastygrams

from the say-what-now?!? dept

Let me kick this off by saying I don't know much about blogger Heather Armstrong, often known as "dooce." I remember that she got some attention for being fired for things she wrote on her blog a long time ago, and then built a successful blog-based business in the ensuing years. I also know that she seems to bring out strong emotions -- both for and against her -- from her readers. I can relate to that. What I can't relate to, however, is going legal because someone wrote a vague blog post suggesting that she happened to be in Los Angeles filming an online video. However, that appears to be exactly what's happened.

Another blog (which I'd never heard of until now) called "GetOffMyInternets.net" published a post, now deleted, though it wasn't too difficult to find the Google cache or popular press which quoted the key parts. As far as I can tell, the "dispute" is that Armstrong claimed that she was taking a break from blogging for a bit. Good for her. But "GOMI" wrote that the "break" was "fake" because she was really in LA filming a show for YouTube. Forgive me again for not quite understanding what's wrong with any of this. I'm not sure why it would be a problem whether or not she was in LA filming whatever she wanted. However, what does seem clear is that Armstrong was not happy about this, declaring publicly that it was defamation, and asking publicly for a lawyer. She appears to have found a lawyer who then sent a legal nastygram to GOMI and its hosting company, claiming that the original post was "defamatory."
Separately, the letter appears to suggest that Armstrong/her lawyer would drop the defamation issue if only GOMI reveals its source for the original story:

Once again, I have no clue if the original allegation is true or not. And I remain at a complete loss as to how it matters to anyone. If she was in LA, good for her. If she wasn't... um... good for her. Who really cares?

But what I do care about is legal bullying, and I have to raise questions about a legal nastygram sent over something as simple as a claim about where someone was at a particular time. While Armstrong and her lawyer seem to think that it's defamation, beyond the trouble understanding what the problem is here, the bar for defamation for a public figure, which Armstrong undoubtedly is, is quite high, and requires malicious intent. It's difficult to see how the original post would come anywhere within the same time zone as that bar.

That said, in looking over some of Armstrong's history, it appears she, too, was once against legal bullying:

I have no faith in our legal system, one that guarantees victory only for the party who can afford to pay for it, one that would allow a large company to bully a private citizen because it knows that she has no money with which to defend herself.

Perhaps she got the wrong lesson out of that experience.

That said, in typical Streisand Effect fashion, this whole kerfuffle seems to only have called much more attention to the original issue, and brought a spotlight on what (again) appears to be a totally insignificant point. If she's just ignored the post in the first place, and let the matter pass, it seems likely it would have been forgotten long ago. So why waste time and money on lawyers to send a nastygram when, at best, all it's going to do is call much more attention to the original post? What actual "harm" was caused by anything here? Is going to LA to film a web video some sort of massive euphemism for something horrible I don't know about?

Filed Under: defamation, dooce, getoffmyinternets, heather armstrong, nastygram, streisand effect

No That Won't Backfire At All: Questionable Story About Obama's Daughter Disappears From The Web

from the rampant-speculation dept

Generally speaking, the press has something of an implicit agreement that they don't use underage Presidential offspring in politically tinged stories. For obvious reasons, it's considered to be a pretty cynical move. Of course, if they actually do something newsworthy, it might be a different story. This afternoon a bunch of stories started appearing, talking about how President Obama's daughter Malia was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of a trip with some classmates (and 25 secret service agents). This story was reported on by the AFP wire service, and some tied it to the fact that the State Department recently issued a travel advisory urging Americans to stay away from parts of Mexico. Not surprisingly, some picked up on this story to suggest some sort of... something. Double standard? Hypocrisy? Of course, the details suggest this really was not much of a story. If you actually read the State Department warning, it makes it clear that there is no warning in place for Oaxaca -- so this trip doesn't appear to go against that warning.

It seems likely, then, that the AFP decided to pull back the story once someone pointed that out, but the story is now rapidly disappearing from a variety of online publications (big and small), leading to questions and easy political points about how the story is being "scrubbed." Google News listed about 27 versions of the story when I looked, and later, following the links, I found almost every single one of them was flat out gone. In most cases, they were replaced with a 404 (including The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Australian) or sometimes just redirecting people to a front page (Huffington Post and International Business Times). The only version I still found up was at TurkishPress.com, but it might not last very long.

Now, I tend to think that using the President's underage kids for a political story is generally a low blow and not particularly nice, but if there is something newsworthy happening, it should be fair game. I also think that, from the sound of it, this story got blown out of proportion by those who didn't bother to actually read the details of the destination or the State Department's specific warning which notes no problem at that destination.

But, having said all that, simply having the article disappear completely, rather than putting up a correction or an explanation of what happened, simply fuels both the conspiracy theories and the interest in the story. It's exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation. There are a variety of possibilities here. The administration may have asked the press to pull the story, which would only generate more interest in the news. The AFP, upon realizing that it shouldn't have posted the story, may have issued a kill order/retraction of sorts. Or perhaps there's some other reasoning. But there are good ways to handle these situations and ways that are guaranteed to backfire. Simply making the articles disappear is pretty much guaranteed to backfire and generate more interest in the story, even if it's a total non-story. Replacing the original story with a "hey, we thought this, but we got it wrong," would have been much more effective.

Filed Under: corrections, journalism, malia obama, online, press, stories, streisand effect

DOJ 'Streisands' Its Own Prosecutor By Requesting His Name Be Removed From An Unflattering Court Opinion

from the coverup:-ur-doing-it-wrong dept

No matter how many Streisands get hoisted by their internet-aided petard, there's always another person or entity who thinks he/she/it can somehow bury unflattering information/photos/Facebook status updates.

In what is the latest (but certainly not the last) example of how wielding a bigass shovel only makes people more aware of your desperate burial attempts, a prosecutor for the Department of Justice was called out by name in a judicial bench slap for telling a "half-truth" in the courtroom:

Albert was criticized by the court for telling "a half-truth" during the trial - specifically, misrepresenting testimony from a prior proceeding while cross-examining the defendant at trial.

This misrepresentation resulted in a mistrial. The question presented on appeal was whether the prohibition on double jeopardy prohibited a retrial (a question that the panel decided in the government's favor).

Well, the DOJ wasn't too pleased with having their boy (Jerry Albert) being called out in the court's opinion and requested his name be replaced with the more innocuous this-could-be-anybody term "the prosecutor."

[U]pon initial release of this opinion, the government filed a motion requesting that we remove Albert's name and replace it with references to "the prosecutor." The motion contended that naming Albert publicly is inappropriate given that we do not yet know the outcome of any potential investigations or disciplinary proceedings.

Much like jabbing at a alligator with a stick, this only served to make the presiding Judge righteously pissed. Judge Carlos Bea went "all in" on his amended opinion, smacking around the DOJ for its presumptuousness:

The mistake in judgment does not lie with AUSA Albert alone. We are also troubled by the government's continuing failure to acknowledge and take responsibility for Albert's error.

The Department of Justice has an obligation to its lawyers and to the public to prevent prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutors, as servants of the law, are subject to constraints and responsibilities that do not apply to other lawyers; they must serve truth and justice first. Their job is not just to win, but to win fairly, staying within the rules. That did not happen here, and the district court swiftly and correctly declared a mistrial when Albert's misquotation was revealed.

Now, not only is Jerry Albert's name tied to such bad-for-business terms like "mistrial," "misconduct" and "misrepresentation," but by simply pressing this point, the Department of Justice turned a mere footnote of interest only to those directly involved in the trial into a rapidly expanding Google bomb that links the DOJ with these same bad-for-business terms, along with other unflattering terms like "coverup" and "benchslap."

And Judge Bea wasn't done yet, adding this crucial (and damning) paragraph to the benchslap/Streisandstorm:

We declined to adopt the government's suggestion and denied its motion. We have noticed that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona regularly makes public the names of prosecutors who do good work and win important victories. E.g., Press Release, U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona, "Northern Arizona Man Sentenced to Federal Prison for Arson," (January 31, 2012).... If federal prosecutors receive public credit for their good works - as they should - they should not be able to hide behind the shield of anonymity when they make serious mistakes.

Hell. Yes. Government representatives are always so quick to grab credit for anything tangentially related to their work, but good lord, they still seem to think that screwing up should somehow be rewarded with swift coverups and plausible deniability.

Filed Under: carlos bea, doj, jerry albert, misconduct, streisand effect, us attorney

Building Company Realizes That Threatening A Blogger With Bogus Libel Suit Was A Bad Idea; Sincerely Apologizes

from the you-don't-see-this-very-often dept

For years, we've covered stories of companies reacting badly to finding something they don't like about themselves online, and threatening to sue those who posted the content with libel. Many lawyers tend to go to extremes in threatening people, with the idea of scaring them into just taking content down. These days, of course, that's quite likely to backfire, as the recipient can just go public with it, and shame the company. Even so, it's rare for those companies to come out with a really sincere apology. Aaron DeOliveira points us to an interesting story involving a building company, Guardian Building Products, that freaked out over a blog that showed "a lousy installation" of their insulation. The company threatened to sue, saying that the blog post "constitute[s] libel, slander and commercial disparagement." In response, the blogger, Dr. Allison Bailes, went public with the threat.

And here's where Guardian realized that perhaps it was doing something really, really wrong. It sent a very apologetic letter: While you can (reasonably) argue that the company should have known better than to send the original threat letter, there is something to be said for owning up to the fact that you made a big mistake, and (hopefully) actually learning from it.

Filed Under: apologies, defamation, streisand effect
Companies: guardian

Gamestop Discovers The Streisand Effect; Gives OnLive Tons Of Free Publicity In Trying To Take Away Coupons

from the epic-failure dept

Last week was an interesting week for Gamestop. As a ton of you sent in, the company decided to require all stores to open up all PC copies of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and discard an included coupon for a free version of the game via the OnLive streaming platform. OnLive and Square Enix had announced the promotion to help both companies, but apparently Gamestop was jealous to be cut out of the mix. Below is an image of the order that GameSpy, who broke that story, received: From there the story got more bizarre. Gamestop didn't even seem to realize how bad this looked at first, insisting that it just didn't want to help advertise "a competitor." Soon after all of this came out, Gamestop ordered its stores to remove the game from its shelves entirely as part of a "recall" in agreement with Square Enix. The likely implication: Gamestop and Square Enix worked out a deal to offer versions of the game without the coupon, meaning Gamestop employees won't have to destroy the coupons.

However, the real story in all of this should be just how much free publicity Gamestop just gave OnLive in its hamfisted attempt to pretend the company didn't exist. And, of course, now it means that anyone wishing to buy the PC version of the game is probably (assuming that no coupons will be available) better off buying it from someone other than Gamestop. I've defended Gamestop's used game sales practices for years, but I'm amazed the company thought any of this was a good idea.

Filed Under: coupons, deus ex, streisand effect
Companies: gamestop, onlive, square enix

Malaysian Man Required To 'Retract' Defamatory Tweet 100 Times On Twitter; Streisanding The Whole Thing

from the twitter-is-the-new-blackboard dept

The folks over at OnTheMedia point us to a bizarre story in Malaysia where a man was accused of defaming a publishing company on Twitter. The guy, Fahmi Fadzil, had tweeted back in January that a friend of his, who was pregnant at the time, was being mistreated by her employer, Female Magazine (owned by Blu Inc. Media). To atone for the "defamation," as part of the settlement he worked out, he's required to tweet an apology 100 times, like a child writing punishment on a chalkboard. You can see the first such tweet here: If you can't see that image, the text reads:

1/100 I've DEFAMED Blu Inc Media & Female Magazine. My tweets on their HR Policies are untrue. I retract those words & hereby apologize

Of course, the end result isn't too surprising to anyone who understands the internet. The Twitter retraction barrage has, of course, attracted all sorts of additional attention, leading to the creation of a specific hashtag for the situation, #defahmi, and lots of additional Twitter conversation, much of it critical of Blu Inc. and Family Magazine -- including at least one tweet telling people to call the company to complain. It kind of makes you wonder if Fadzil agreed to this "settlement" knowing that it would backfire in a big bad way on Blu.

Filed Under: defahmi, defamation, fahmi fadzil, family magazine, malaysia, streisand effect, twitter
Companies: blu inc, twitter

Dan Snyder Helps Us Demonstrate The Streisand Effect In Numbers

from the nice-work-dan dept

Having coined the term "The Streisand Effect" a while back, I'm always interested in more examples of it in action. We recently talked about how Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder sued the Washington City Paper over a tongue-in-cheek article criticizing him, and the response may actually give us some Streisand Effect data. Paul Alan Levy sends over a neat blog post from Tech Cocktail that tries to quantify how much more attention was driven to the article Snyder was so upset about. The answer? An awful lot. As you can see, the article got a bunch of comments early on, and then it died out, as comments tend to do. Then the lawsuit hit. And suddenly the article got more than twice as many comments as it had accumulated up until then. And, of course, the story spread via social networking services as well:

The article garnered 554 tweets and over 7,000 Facebook (FB) likes. A quick survey of City Paper articles shows that few, if any, other articles by Mr. McKenna rate more than 5 comments, tweets or FB likes.

So by suing, Snyder helped drive a ton more traffic to the article that was critical of him. And if you think that within all that traffic some folks are agreeing with Snyder's take on things... again that doesn't appear to be the case:

Activity on the Paper’s Facebook Group has increased and is overwhelmingly supportive, as is the Twittosphere.  Sentiment towards Snyder is unanimously negative as measured by tools like Tweet Feel which at my last count showed a 100% anti-Snyder rating, well below Hosni Mubarak who came in at 67% negative.

Yeah. Perhaps next time, before suing over some minor criticism, people might take such results into account.

Filed Under: dan snyder, data, streisand effect