The astonishingly tenacious Arizona attorney Charles Carreon, apparently not satisfied with his original filing last week, has now amended his case against Matthew Inman et al. to now include California State Attorney General Kamala Harris.

The updated Monday filing is the latest chapter in an increasingly ridiculous legal case involving an online intellectual property dispute. Neither Carreon, Harris, nor any of the other defendants (except for Ars commenter "Modelista") responded immediately to our request for comment. The move to include California’s top law enforcement officer may be a tactic to compel Harris to act on Carreon’s accusations of charitable fundraising fraud as carried out by Inman and IndieGoGo.

Earlier this month, Charles Carreon, the original counsel for the humor website FunnyJunk, wrote a letter to Matthew Inman, the creator of the website The Oatmeal, asking for $20,000 and accusing Inman of defamation. When Inman openly mocked the letter and successfully raised over $200,000 that he said he would donate to charity rather than sending to FunnyJunk, Carreon turned around and sued Inman on his own behalf, adding IndieGoGo, two charities that Inman named as recipients of the money, “Does 1-100,” and as of Monday, California’s state attorney general.

A Swedish shield?

In the new filing, Carreon accuses Inman and IndieGoGo of charity fundraising fraud and names Ars Technica commenter “Modelista” as Doe 1 as violating Carreon’s trademark on his own name—Modelista freely admitted that he was behind the creation of a fake account mocking Charles Carreon, which was soon shut down.

“On June 14, 2012, Doe 1, an Internet user who goes by the name ‘Modelista’ on the ArsTechnica.com website, registered the Twitter name ‘@Charles_Carreon,’ and began publishing fake ‘tweets’ on Twitter that were immediately attributed to Plaintiff,” he writes. “This was not only an act of trademark infringement, but also false personation in violation of California Penal Code § 529.”



In an e-mail sent to Ars on Monday, Modelista declined again to provide any identifying information, saying that he was "just an average guy in his 20s going to university somewhere in Sweden."

"I don't see what targeting an anonymous online identity can accomplish," he continued in an encrypted e-mail sent via Hushmail. "Even in the extreme case where the judge approved a court order to obtain my IP address, I would not be threatened at all as I took several measures to hide my true IP address. Also, not living in the United States is another reason I don't really care about the case."

There is an international legal procedure to serve someone in another country, known as the Hague Service Convention, but generally speaking, it's very difficult, if not practically impossible, to collect a judgment abroad.

Carreon seeks subpoenas, damages

Carreon previously told Ars that he planned to subpoena Ars Technica and Twitter to reveal the identities of Does 1-100.

In the third claim for relief, Carreon accuses Does 2-100 of “cybervandalism,” by “cracking the password on Carreon’s own website and signing him up for pornographic websites. As numerous law blogs have pointed out, there is no such law prohibiting “cybervandalism.”

“Plaintiff has received very large numbers of hate emails, some wishing him death by cancer, and many more forecasting the complete destruction of his professional life. Plaintiff has received voice mails from Dominos pizza wanting to confirm his ordering of pizzas that he in fact did not order,” Carreon writes in the new filing. “Plaintiff never experienced any such invasions of his privacy and quiet enjoyment before the Bear Love campaign.”

The new filing also reiterates Carreon's demand for a judicial order requiring that the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society (Inman's two target charities) get 50 percent of the money raised on the IndieGoGo website. (Carreon himself presumably would take the other half.) He is also seeking damages against Modelista and Inman, and wants a court order barring charities and IndieGoGo from raising money without registering the campaign with the California Attorney General's office.

Update: Carreon wrote to Ars in an e-mail on Monday afternoon: "I'm killing my Twitter account, so anyone who tweets under my name is an impostor."

Listing image by Photo courtesy Charles Carreon