I'd like to start with the important disclaimer that any sexy bears mentioned in this article are fictional and absolutely 100% not based on any bear or bears, alive or dead. Any similarity is entirely coincidental and, quite frankly, a bit weird. With that in mind, I am pleased to say that yesterday evening, Matthew Inman, founder of The Oatmeal, declared his "Operation BearLove Good" a resounding success.

If your knowledge of The Oatmeal is limited to eating it with a spoon for breakfast, the previous paragraph may prove difficult to digest. In brief, then, The Oatmeal is a popular comic website currently being sued by FunnyJunk, another popular comic website. Inman has claimed that FunnyJunk effectively steals his work; FunnyJunk has claimed this amounts to defamation. The latter has now engaged trial attorney Charles Carreon, best known for his legal pursuit of sex.com, to seek $20,000 worth of damages. Internet mirth has ensued, although the humour has been heavily doused with legal disclaimers.

While all this may sound like an elaborate carry on, it is, allegedly, no joke. Nevertheless, Inman has decided to fight FunnyJunk on his own terms, drafting a hilarious letter of defiance, which can be viewed, pterodactyls and all on his blog. Inman has taken the decision that he will hand over $20,000, just not to FunnyJunk. Rather, he will crowdsource the money and donate it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. Because, in Inman's words, "BearLove Good, Cancer Bad" and "philanthropy trumps douchebaggery and greed".

It might not quite be "philanthropy" that is coming up trumps, but Inman is certainly raking the donations in. He reached his $20,000 goal in just 64 minutes and had raised a massive $118,000 24 hours after the fundraiser went live. I'm betting, that by the time this article goes live, BearLove Good will have more money in its bank than Greece.

The speed with which Inman has raised the money is impressive but not entirely surprising. Moving in the right social circles has always been key to successful fundraising; increasingly, however, it seems the social circles that really matter are online. The growing influence of online communities has spawned an internet infrastructure far nimbler at influencing opinion and effecting tangible change than the traditional legal system. Were Inman to have responded to FunnyJunk's claim through the "correct" legal channels it would have taken months, if not years, before the sum of $20,000 appeared in any party's hands. Multiple experts would have been consulted, scores of letters written, bundles of documents filed, and hoops upon hoops jumped through. A protracted process painfully ill-fitted to the modern problems of intellectual property law.

That the power of traditional legal institutions has been superseded by the superspeed of online community mobilisation is a very real argument. Nevertheless, it is important not to get too carried away. For the most part, the legal process is slow for good reason: it takes a lot of time and effort to ensure that all pertinent facts are taken into account and a fair trial takes place. The niceties of due process are not, it seems, something that people tend to respect when left to their own devices. A recent corporate responsibility study found that 93% of consumers would take action if they thought a company had done something wrong, but only 36% would bother properly researching what the company had done wrong.

The speed with which online networks can bandy together to fight a perceived injustice has resulted in several acts of benevolence. Communities such as 4Chan and Reddit have donated enormous sums to charity and helped redress unfair hierarchies of power. But these communities can also get it wrong. In one example of misguided vigilantism, a Redditor urged his peers to mobilise against a user claiming to shave her head for cancer as it was "obviously a huge scam". It turned out, however, that there was no scam, just a smiley St Lawrence senior left somewhat traumatised by the online vitriol unleashed against her.

Bearing these cautionary tales in mind, then, back to The Oatmeal inquiry, where attorney Charles Carreon is in a state of bewilderment over Inman's "style of responding to a legal threat". What happens next is anybody's guess but it is seems likely that it will make, if not an ass, a Kodiak bear of the law. And that, perhaps, is no bad thing.

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