Is it really over?

Charles Carreon, the FunnyJunk lawyer who got into a spat with Oatmeal cartoonist Matt Inman and ended up suing Inman and a few charities, finally retracted his legal claims last week. But the retraction was provisional—"without prejudice" in legal parlance—and the suit can be brought again.

This weekend, it became clear that Camp Carreon isn't done with Inman yet—a new video depicts the cartoonist as a "Psycho Santa," while a new website suggests that Carreon might like to pursue litigation against those who engaged in a "Distributed Internet Reputational Attack" against him.

Rapeutation

When the controversy first began, Charles Carreon penned a little ditty about Inman that he called "Psycho Santa." It had lyrics like:

His prehistoric origin’s a mystery – Did he escape from the lavatory? Was he made by the Pentagon and NSA A living drone that shoots mind rays, Makin’ zombies of his followers – Internet slaves! He’s a psycho-Santa with a big bag of tricks, Ringin’ a bell, and beggin’ for clicks, Psycho Santa got a itty bitty stick, Psycho Santa, don’t fall for his schtick.

Last week, Carreon's wife Tara wrote on her website that the song was being turned into a video. "We're coming onto your playground, evil children," she wrote. "We're going to make an intelligent video. It's not like there are very many out there. Thank God for the ones that are there. It'll probably be another day or two. There is so much you can do when you make a video."

And now it's here, with the new subtitle, "The Heroic Exploits of Matt Inman / A Work of Perpendicular Fact." (Readers can judge its intelligence for themselves.)

Tara's commentary on the video is a bit... hard to parse:

Did you think I wanted to become a deity? OMG, that is SO male! Spare me the maleness of this world. I'd get rid of you ALL if I could. I wouldn't leave a one of you. I told that to Charles the other night, and he got a hurt look on his face. He said, "You wouldn't even save the best man of all?" I said, "No fucking way. You're still a man." I said it with a lot of force so that that would be the end of it. But no, he's got to shout me down. He's always got a sneaky, smart-stupid comeback. He lives on the strategists. He says, "Well, there are no girls who are any better." Fucker, he won the argument this time. But he can't even begin to compare to my win rate. I've been winning my whole life. He's been winning to, but between the two of us, I have the upper hand. He had the upper hand during the first 30 years of our marriage. But I'm going to make sure we go out with a BANG! And the Inman people wanted us to be "humble." Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! Take your "humble" and shove it up your ass. You see that plaque above my door? That's the first thing people see when they come into my house. DO NOT FUCK WITH ME! You think Charles is tough? He would be NOTHING without me. I made the son of a famous CIA family a laughing-stock among other CIA. What the fuck happened to [columnist] Kathleen Parker after I hit her [with a digitally altered pornographic photo]? Another laughter-fest among her friends? She runs with a cruel crowd, like the Inman gang. They wouldn't hesitate at doing a female sacrifice just for fun, because the opportunity presented itself. I'm working on taking down Carl Jung and the rest of the Nazis right now. I've got lots of ammunition pointed in their direction. They might be getting a little nervous about having their BIG SECRET come out, which Houston Stewart Chamberlain so foolishly gave me. It's not allowed to be spoken, only read. But people can't help but crow! I heard that Gyatrul Rinpoche told all my fellow Buddhists that I was like a general, leading an army. That's pretty admiring. But I really don't think that I deserve it. Can I send it back to him?

In any event, the salient point here isn't that some Web video got made, but that it's up on a site called Rapeutation.com. The site, apparently set up just for the video, suggests that Internet users are (or have been) engaged in a coordinated assault on Carreon's reputation. It also suggests that Carreon was targeted by a "Distributed Internet Reputation Attack (DIRA)" in which "large numbers of both human and digital Internet zombies [were used] to proliferate unmanageable quantities of disparaging information in an effort to alter the conduct of the individual or entity."

The site proposes a new tort for DIRA—that is, a new sort of Internet defamation lawsuit that could be brought by aggrieved parties. (Carreon apparently feels quite aggrieved; Rapeutation's tagline is: "A Distributed Internet Reputation Attack or, What You're Left With After You've Suffered One.")

"The frequency of DIRAs makes it apparent that old laws concerning defamation need reforming to take account of the pernicious effects of allowing Internet mobs to run riot, placing meaningful limits on what is fair play in the realm of social media," says the anonymous author of this section.

Taken together, none of this sounds like Carreon and his allies are really done with Matt Inman and the "cyber-vandals" who have plagued them for the last few weeks. The real question is whether that anger takes the form of amateur videos and online ranting—or whether it leads back to court.