Last month's legal faceoff between Tucson lawyer Charles Carreon and online cartoonist Matt Inman devolved quickly into a sideshow, but it was spurred by a quite serious initial letter asking for $20,000 in cash. Carreon originally represented a user-generated content humor site called FunnyJunk, which was upset about comments Inman had made during a public spat in 2011.

The dispute here wasn't between a big, bad corporation and an aggrieved Little Guy, but between two small businesses working out a dispute online. That alone would make FunnyJunk's side of the story compelling; certainly, FunnyJunk felt unfairly attacked over claims that it was profiting from Inman's work. During their initial 2011 confrontation, the FunnyJunk administrator sent an initial message to his users saying that Inman "wants to sue funnyjunk and shut it down! He thinks we're nothing more than dirty content thieves." It included links to Inman's contact page and Facebook account.

A later public message was more conciliatory, telling Inman, "Check by tomorrow and most [of your comics] should be gone. If you still see your comics on here, feel free to use the contact form and they will be removed in 24 hours as usual. This site has been around for 10 years. It is not a run by not [sic] scam operation that steals content for advertising profits... This site barely affords to stay alive as it is and has enough problems."

A year later, those problems had apparently mounted and FunnyJunk decided to proceed with the letter to Inman, which claimed defamation and asked for money in care of "FunnyJunk LLC." In an interview last month, Carreon was asked whether FunnyJunk had suffered specific harm from the 2011 dispute, and he suggested that it had. "You got people voting with their feet and trampling to get out of there," he said. "What do you think that does to your user base? What do you think that does to your advertising money?"

In all the drama which followed Inman's publication of this demand letter, one key question went unanswered: who had actually been behind it all—and why did he take this approach to settling an online dispute? In other words, who ran FunnyJunk, and what was his story?

We wanted to know how a comedy site ended up joining forces with Carreon, how it settled on asking for $20,000, and how its owner felt about the DMCA and the copyright questions raised by Matt Inman. We wanted to know why he was willing to ask for a check but not take any named responsibility for pursuing a serious defamation accusation. We wanted to know what it was like to build and run a one-man community-based Internet business for over a decade, and how one seemingly petty dispute had created so many problems for him.

But to get answers, we would first have to find Mr. FunnyJunk.

A hard man to find

The owner of FunnyJunk isn't keen on being found. The site offers no name or phone number for its owner. The owner has never responded to our inquiries through the site's Web contact form. Charles Carreon did not respond to requests for more information about his client. FunnyJunk community members who speculate about the owner's identity regularly have those comments deleted. But, as Fox Mulder knew, the truth is out there.

Our search began with a 2003 federal copyright infringement case in Madison, Wisconsin—one so old we had to pay to have the archived paper file shipped up from Chicago and scanned by the court. A photographer named David Flad had snapped a picture of a dripping wet cat and called it "Bert's Bath"; a number of comedy sites were hosting the picture, and Flad sued them all. One of these sites was FunnyJunk, which Flad traced to an apartment on Highland Road in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—but he had no owner's name. (At the time, FunnyJunk's registration address seems to have been public.) The case against FunnyJunk was eventually dismissed.

After this, FunnyJunk got harder to find. WHOIS data for the site had the true owner obscured. An old WHOIS entry for the funnyjunk.com domain shows a Baton Rouge location that appears to be a UPS Store. It also provided a phone number, but our attempts to call it produced no response. (Other old WHOIS data lists the owner's address as "North Korea, Pyongyang, NK 90210.") The FunnyJunk site now uses a Florida-based WHOIS privacy protection service to completely obscure even this information.

In 2003, FunnyJunk was owned by Spork You, LLC, a new company organized in the state of Delaware. Delaware state business records shows that the company was incorporated in October 2003 through the Company Corporation, which helps small businesses like FunnyJunk register their firms. Contact information on file with the state points only to the Company Corporation.

As for the website itself, a traceroute shows that it relies on hosting from LeaseWeb, a Dutch company based in Haarlem. (Add this to our list of questions—why a Dutch hosting company for a US company?)

FunnyJunk's legal situation appears to have continued this way for some time. Then, in June 2011, the same month that the debate with Matt Inman broke out online, FunnyJunk LLC was registered in the state of Nevada by one Kirk Walker, who appears to be a local lawyer. Spork You LLC was apparently dropped. (We were unable to obtain comment from Walker.)

In May 2012, FunnyJunk's owner worked with Charles Carreon to get his site's legal situation in order. Carreon quickly registered as the site's DMCA agent for copyright claims (a requirement for any user-generated content site that wants "safe harbor" for prosecution over infringing material its user may upload").

He also moved to register "FUNNYJUNK" as a US trademark. (Fun fact: Carreon has also filed for a trademark on the words: "A FRIEND WITH WEED IS A FRIEND INDEED" on behalf of a Nevada business called Best Buds.) The trademark filling notes that the FunnyJunk name had been "first used in commerce" all the way back on December 1, 2001. It describes the site as "an on-line community website featuring a forum where users can post, comment on, and cast votes of approval or disapproval for pictures, photographs, cartoons, stories and videos, and participate in a ranking system in which users are ranked according to the number of favorable votes their postings receive."

The trademark application also introduced a new company location in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with the same address as Bongo International. Bongo helps businesses "overcome the challenges associated with International Cross Border eCommerce transactions."

Still, despite the mass of data, none of this company information actually linked back to a specific person behind the site. FunnyJunk has been connected to Louisiana, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, the Netherlands, and New York, but generally to postal boxes and mail drops. Who and where was FunnyJunk's owner, really?

The name

The FunnyJunk admin appears to have a love/hate relationship with the site's users, which explains why some want to know who he is so badly. Site users have long made a game of figuring out their admin's identity, and he would routinely promise in comment threads to tell someone his first name as a kind of reward.

But in general, commenting about the actions of "admin" wasn't taken well. As the recent controversy with The Oatmeal erupted and FunnyJunk users began writing hundreds of posts about the site's owner and his actions, he set up a sitewide word filter that altered every use of his username "admin" to the phrase "Do you even lift?" (The move baffled many of FunnyJunk's users for some time.)

The owner's name, though, was no longer a secret. At some point in late 2011, it was just sitting there on the Web, if you knew where to look. Nevada Secretary of State business records require companies to supply a list of officers, which are publicly available—and so, eventually, FunnyJunk LLC had to name names. It finally did so, listing only one: Bryan Durel of New York City.

At last we were getting somewhere—but Durel listed as his address what appears to be a UPS store on Lafayette Street in NYC. And at some point recently when he was updating the site's WHOIS data, Durel listed both his own name as the administrative contact and his address as a separate US Post Office PO Box on 14th Street, about 15 blocks from the previous address. It was starting to sound like FunnyJunk really was a one-man operation based now in New York City, with no office, no listed phone, and no interest in talking to the press.

IRL

We weren't the only ones interested in the story of the man behind the site. Writing on the meme wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica earlier this year, an anonymous user called "SuperIrene" added text to the FunnyJunk page, including "some interesting facts about admin IRL [in real life]." SuperIrene claimed to know him, and connected the various dots in the story:

Originally from Baton Rogue in Louisiana, Admin now lives in central New York... Admin used to own a company called "Spork You, Inc" which owned the original FunnyJunk domain. Quite recently, Admin (and his internet-lawyer) decided to register FunnyJunk, LLC (in the glorious state of Nevada) and conveniently decided to leave the list of financial officers empty until about two weeks after the deadline for submission. After submitting the officer list, Admin pretty much doxed himself (not that anyone actually cares). As of now, Admin is 27 years old.

No sources were provided for these statements, but searching through the FunnyJunk forums turned up plenty of posts making the same points by one "mightyirene"—apparently the same person—who claims to have met the admin in New York. (The posts have been deleted, but Google's cache sees all, remembers all.)

"I've seen him in real life a couple of times," wrote mightyirene. "I used to live in the same area as him. I don't know where he actually lives (house and street) but it's in the same neighborhood. I'm not a stalker or anything, it's just that I was curious."

The news set off some of FunnyJunk's more excitable members. "FOR 2 F---ING YEARS," wrote one. "2 [unbelievable string of profanities] YEARS. AND HIS NAME IS JUST F---ING THERE. OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU MAN."

But it wasn't a useful nugget of news for long.

Under new management

On July 13, FunnyJunk's registered users received a message from a new user called "FJDeveloper." The message asked for help filtering porn from the site, and then added, "Also, FJ is now under new management. Many improvements and fixes coming next week including a moderator team which will now review all flags and work with users to fix account issues."

Had FunnyJunk been sold? Were some new mods simply being brought in to patrol the site? Would the new FunnyJunk talk to the media?

At least one of these questions has been clearly answered; the site now has a new entry on its "Contact" page saying, "We do NOT respond to media inquiries."

As for the site's ownership, the Nevada registration data was updated on July 10. The new "active manager" of the site is one Benjamin Bunker, Esquire—a young lawyer in Las Vegas. Durel's entry is now marked "historical."

Update: A reader e-mails to note that four domain names containing the words "Bryan Durel" were transferred away from FunnyJunk's nameservers on June 30.

Listing image by Flickr user Eva the Weaver