Apparently, people refuse to leave Matthew Inman alone and just let him continue to be one of the funniest people on the internet. The creator of The Oatmeal webcomic finds himself the target of yet another lawsuit, reports Ars Technica.
This time, Inman is in the sights of a Massachusetts-based greeting card company who claims that The Oatmeal’s foray into greeting card sales violates their trademark.
Recently, The Oatmeal went into business with Recycled Greetings, the card company responsible for the Papyrus gifts and cards chain. Together, they produced a set of Oatmeal greeting cards, which are available for purchase on The Oatmeal site. The Massachusetts greeting card company, Oatmeal Studios, says that Inman’s use of The Oatmeal is too similar to their brand, as to cause confusion. Oatmeal Studios claims to have been in the greeting card-marking business for the last 35 years.
According to Ars, trademark infringement is the only claim that Oatmeal Studios has made, and they’ve yet to ask for any specific amount of damages.
Like I mentioned above, this isn’t the first legal battle that Inman has found himself in recently. The last one all started when Inman published a blog post showing how the site FunnyJunk was republishing The Oatmeal comics and monetizing them without attribution. Later, FunnyJunk hired famous sex.com domain litigator Charles Carreon to demand damages from Inman on the grounds of defamation.
Inman responded, but probably not in the manner that Carreon expected.
Instead of obliging, Inman drew a picture of Carreon’s “mom” having sex with a bear. He also asked the internet community to raise money for charity (which they did, to the tune of $200,000+). He never paid Carreon or FunnyJunk any of the money, and now that ridiculous suit has been closed.
But from the ashes of one, rises another. This story is developing and we’ll let you know when Inman responds (which we’re sure he will).