Matthew Inman, author and artist of The Oatmeal, contacted Funny Junk as they were hosting his content without permission (i.e. stealing it), and surrounding it with profitable ads. Funny Junk took down some but not all of Mr Inman’s content. He decided to leave the rest of the copyright infringing material as it ‘wasn’t worth it’. A year later, Funny Junk have threatened to sue The Oatmeal, accusing the author of several things, including deliberately stealing rankings by repeating the keyword ‘funny junk’.
Mr Inman has posted an annotated copy of the letter – rightly pointing out that “Rankings in Google are determined by the amount of activity and links a page receives on the internet. I rank highly for ‘FunnyJunk’ because a bunch of news sources wrote about my blog post after I published it.”
This throws up a number of interesting issues, most notably reputation management and the legal ramifications of SEO – especially when explored by people who don’t understand coding (later the letter accuses Mr Inman of utilising malicious code. The code was a picture of a dinosaur).
This prehistoric lawyer isn’t the first to not understand how that there interwebz works.
- An e-commerce site was sued for linking to a site using brand name anchor text. ¹
- A small removals firm was sued for outranking a bigger firm using ‘trademarked keywords’. ²
- Websites have even been sued for deep-linking to a person’s site. ³
These lawsuits have been thrown out of court. Unsurprisingly, because they range from the spurious to the malicious. Deep linking will increase the traffic and ranking or a site. Brand name anchor text has been said by Google to be ‘safer’ than exact match keyword anchor text. And trying to trademark terms like ‘moving helpers’ is patently ridiculous. Real copyright violations are one thing – for example when Funny Junk republished Matt Inman’s content without permission. Suing people for who they link to, what anchor text they use – you can’t call that defamatory, even if it’s a bad review, so long as the person actually bought the product.
The best response to a negative review is to learn from it, improve and do better next time. And the response to being asked to stop stealing another person’s content is not to sue them for $20,000. You’ll look like an ass.
