
FunnyJunk lawyer to subpoena Twitter, Ars Technica - rkudeshi
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/doubling-down-funnyjunk-lawyer-to-subpoena-ars-twitter/
======
grellas
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
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.

~~~
JackC
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.

------
nicholassmith
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
When a comment of yours is marked dead, that's typically not an invitation to
immediately make the same comment verbatim.

~~~
ghshephard
You get "dead" on a dupe submit (happens periodically with me - not sure why)
- not just down voting.

~~~
brian_cloutier
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks.

------
chime
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.

~~~
tptacek
I've been following this case on Popehat and Lowering The Bar (two excellent
legal blogs) and both have been at pains, in every post, to _plead_ with the
Internet to stop fucking with Carreon and FJ: the Internet pranks are,
regardless of how Carreon appears to be reacting to them, making Carreon's
actual goals easier to obtain.

The consensus seems to be that Carreon has less than no case, and may in fact
be setting himself up for significant reprisals from the courts... except to
the extent that douchey Internet pranksters build a case for him by breaking
the law themselves.

~~~
hobin
But are such people breaking the law? To my knowledge, being a douchebag on
the internet is not a crime (nor do I think it should be). Could you perhaps
point me to one of those posts that explain this in more detail?

~~~
icegreentea
If being a douchebag involves defamation, then yes, you can be sued in civil
court. This is all going under civil action, not criminal court (big
difference).

Remember, broadly speaking, defamation is just undertaking some action that
gives some entity a negative image. Before you go nuts on that, yes, truth is
a defense against defamation (ie: it is not defamation if it is true). At
which point parody becomes defamation is something of a grey line, which
Carreon will try his hardest to use.

If Carreon can paint the image in court that the internet is after him, it
would probably help him make his case that the fake twitter account is
defamation, not mere parody. After all, context matters.

------
grassclip
"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
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
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
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.

~~~
suresk
I've spent a lot of time learning about the decision to dropping atomic bombs
on Japan, and it is quite nuanced. I'm still not 100% sure if it was the
correct course of action, given the information available at the time.

First, any attempt at an invasion of mainland Japan would have likely resulted
in horrendous casualties for both sides - and it is almost certain that
civilian casualties would have been substantially higher in the event of an
invasion.

To counter that point, it is unlikely that an invasion would have been
required to secure a surrender, and American insistence on unconditional
surrender was a factor in prolonging the war with Japan.

Third, there is at least some merit to the idea that dropping the bombs wasn't
just meant to scare the Japanese - it was also meant to demonstrate their
power to the USSR.

Incidentally, it is pretty clear that Truman and other Allied leaders saw the
Japanese as being sub-human in some ways[1]. How much of this came from
societal factors and how much of it came from experiences of the absolutely
brutal Pacific campaign battles is debatable, but it is certainly unfair to
lay it all at the feet of Disney.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Racism_and_dehumanization)

~~~
CamperBob2
_Third, there is at least some merit to the idea that dropping the bombs
wasn't just meant to scare the Japanese - it was also meant to demonstrate
their power to the USSR._

Absolutely. It's possible that the invasion of Japan that was prevented by the
bombings was not going to be the one that most people think of. I've always
felt the atomic bombings had more to do with sending a message to Stalin than
with sending one to Hirohito. At the close of WWII, the Russians were making
some very ominous moves in Japan's direction.

Was it worth 200,000+ lives to keep Japan from spending the next several
decades as a Soviet satellite state? Very possibly... but I wasn't there, and
the people who were sacrificed certainly didn't get a chance to make their
views known.

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

~~~
vacri
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
It's possible he didn't write any of that material on that website.

~~~
vacri
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#CONDOLEEZ...](http://www.american-
buddha.com/poet.condoleeza.htm#CONDOLEEZA)

------
slavak

      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.

------
evilbit
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.

------
jfoutz
Lets try to ruin lives over imaginary internet points!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayres_law>

~~~
derleth
Fixed link:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law>

(Your link really doesn't lead anywhere useful. Try it.)

~~~
jlgreco
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
Not hard at all:

#REDIRECT [[Sayre's law]]

~~~
jlgreco
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>

The idea would be to make mediawiki itself automatically preform reasonable
redirects when pages don't exist.

~~~
officemonkey
>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.

~~~
jlgreco
The Wikimedia Foundation wiki's might have that many uses, but I'd say most
installations of mediawiki do not.

------
seanalltogether
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.

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

~~~
SimHacker
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"!

------
solox3
Not sure where this is going. Isn't there a law that persecutes lawyers
wanting to abuse the law for personal gain?

------
pwg
Those who fail to learn from the Streisand Effect [1] are doomed to repeat it.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect>

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

~~~
mrgoldenbrown
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
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.

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

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

