
Finding the mystery man behind FunnyJunk - iProject
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/finding-the-mystery-man-behind-funnyjunk/
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etfb
A good bit of detective work. This is how you "do" journalism. Compare and
contrast with the article about the developers of Flash that basically looked
on LinkedIn and Google and called it a wrap.

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s_henry_paulson
What's more likely?

That Bryan sold a 1-man web operation to a lawyer, or that he's using a lawyer
he's paying to try to hide himself behind?

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toyg
He could have simply sold FJ to a better entity, somebody who can keep their
shit together and use real lawyers. For better or worse, this whole thing
brought a lot of attention to an otherwise-unremarkable content aggregator,
and I bet plenty of people would be willing to take a shot at capitalising on
such a frenzy.

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praptak
It sucks that a facade of a company lets anyone wreak havoc anonymously.
Businesses should be tied to real people responsible for their actions.

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pavel_lishin
It seems like Carreon was doing most of the havoc-wreaking, and most
definitely not anonymously.

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praptak
This case is special. He took it personally and started acting on his own
behalf, but in the initial demand for money he was just a proxy, as lawyers
usually are.

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TomGullen
> Add this to our list of questions—why a Dutch hosting company for a US
> company?

Maybe they offer a better deal?

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nucleardog
Maybe because a couple of DMCA complaints stacking up in the states would
result in the site being taken down with most economy-style hosting, and given
the nature of the site they're bound to get a few...

Maybe the Netherlands just offer saner intellectual property laws.

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keithpeter
How much money would a site like FunnyJunk take annually? I mean is this thing
a hobby or is it paying the kind of money you could live on in New York (which
I assume to be expensive)?

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pavel_lishin
New York isn't quite as expensive as people make it out to be. It's not cheap
- but you can sacrifice things like square footage, or short commute times to
save on rent, which is most of the expense.

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keithpeter
I take your point, but do we think this bloke is seeing $10k or $100k a year,
or just enough to pay for the server/bandwidth?

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pavel_lishin
The article seemed to mention him complaining about money, but that could just
be an indirect way of asking for donations, or re-inforcing the need for
funding drives. (I've done this before, when we were hosting a VBulletin forum
when we didn't really have jobs or much spare income in college.)

