Recently, a blogger named Simon Owens ran a social experiment on Craigslist. He wandered into the “Casual Encounters” section of the personal ads where countless men and women were soliticing for no-strings-attached sex and wondered, Is it really that easy? As a test, he composed several ads with different permutations of assumed identity and sexual orientation: straight/bi men/women looking for the opposite/same sex. He then posted it to New York, Chicago, and Houston, and tallied the results.

Overwhelmingly and instantly, the ads from the fake women looking for male partners were inundated with responses, sometimes several per minute. All the other ads received lukewarm responses, at best. These results weren’t surprising, but some of the observations were… Many of these men used their real names and included personally identifiable information, including work email addresses and home phone numbers. Several admitted they were married and cheating on their spouses. Many included photos, often nude.

His first conclusion was very reasonable: “If a really malicious person wanted to get on craigslist and ruin a lot of people’s lives, he easily could.”

Jason Fortuny’s Craigslist Experiment

On Monday, a Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: “Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get in 24 hours?”

He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad (warning: not safe for work) in another area, reposted it to Craigslist Seattle, and waited for the responses to roll in. Like Simon’s experiment, the response was immediate. He wrote, “178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress. Responses include full e-mail addresses (both personal and business addresses), names, and in some cases IM screen names and telephone numbers.”

In a staggering move, he then published every single response, unedited and uncensored, with all photos and personal information to Encyclopedia Dramatica (kinda like Wikipedia for web fads and Internet drama). Read the responses (warning: sexually explicit material).

Instantly, commenters on the LiveJournal thread started identifying the men. Dissenters emailed the guys to let them know they were scammed. Several of them were married, which has led to what will likely be the first of many separations. One couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed, as their religious family and friends weren’t aware of their lifestyle. Another spotted a fellow Microsoft employee, based on their e-mail address. And it’s really just the beginning, since the major search engines haven’t indexed these pages yet. After that, who knows? Divorces, firings, lawsuits, and the assorted hell that come from having your personal sex life listed as the first search result for your name.

Possibly the strangest thing about this sex baiting prank is that the man behind it is unabashedly open about his own identity. A graphic artist in Kirkland, Washington, Jason has repeatedly posted his contact information, including home phone, address, and photos. He’s already received one threat of physical violence. Is he oblivious to the danger, or does he just not care? Since his stated interest is “pushing people’s buttons,” I’m guessing the latter. (See update: Jason’s been removing contact information from his sites, so some of these links are now broken.)

Legality and Privacy

But was any law actually broken? Fortuny obviously misrepresented himself under false pretenses, which is itself possibly actionable, but the privacy implications beyond that are very interesting. Does emailing someone your personal information act as an implicit waiver of your right to privacy? I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, no.

If taken to court, he’s at risk of two primary civil claims. “Intentional infliction of emotional distress,” while notoriously hard to prove in court, is certainly easier here based on his own writings. The second, more relevant claim, is “public disclosure of private facts.” This Findlaw article on the Washingtonienne scandal sums it up nicely:

The disclosure must be public. The facts must be private. The plaintiff must be identified. The publication must be “highly offensive.” And there must be an “absence of legitimate concern to the public” with respect to the publication.

It certainly seems like this clearly fits the criteria for a tort claim, but I’d love to hear some legal interpretation from the law bloggers out there. Does volunteering your information in a private context somehow invalidate your privacy rights? I don’t think so. (For more information, see the EFF’s Bloggers’ FAQ on Privacy.)

I contacted Anil Dash, VP of LiveJournal’s parent company Six Apart, to see how he felt about the breaking drama. He was clearly disturbed by it, but after contacting LJ’s support staff, realized there wasn’t much they could do. If they find abusive information, they act quickly to remove it, but in this case, all the identifiable information is on a third-party site. “There are always people who aren’t going to be productive members of a community. We try to be consistent in honoring requests if an individual’s personal info is being posted without their permission,” said Anil. “The hard part, of course, is that nobody can control every site on the web, so there’s always somewhere else for a person to go if they really want to be malicious or destructive..”

I haven’t contacted Craigslist, but it’s clear that as this story develops, it will inevitably have a profound impact on the community. A friend put it simply: “Adults are stupid on the Internet.” More likely, their expectations of privacy just haven’t been fundamentally challenged yet. They send naked photos of themselves to strangers because it helps get them noticed by the women they’re emailing, and it’s never backfired on them.

On a final note, this is just getting started. Sex baiting is so simple and so effective, I thought immediately that others would be inspired to do the same thing. And yesterday morning, a commenter confirmed that the first copycat prank is already complete in Craigslist Portland. 94 replies so far, with 60 photos. It won’t be the last.

September 10: Jason Fortuny modified his homepage to remove all references to his professional life: portfolio, resume, and references to past clients are all gone. (Compare to the older versions on the Internet Archive.) It also looks like he’s been scrubbing his personal contact information from his Livejournal comments and homepage. For example, this link from my post originally went to a comment with his contact information, but it’s been removed entirely. (Strangely, he didn’t remove his home address and phone number from this entry.) Also, Encyclopedia Dramatica has been down intermittently all day, presumably because of the traffic.

September 11: Jason Fortuny’s web server is now down entirely, possibly because of today’s Slashdot coverage. (One commenter claims to live in the same apartment building as Fortuny.) Other recent notable media mentions: BBC News, and Wired’s Ryan Singel has coverage and a response to commenters. The New York Times article is slated for tomorrow was written, but ultimately rejected for publication.

Update, Part 2: Jason Fortuny sent an email to Tucker Max for advice (himself Internet-famous for posting his sexual exploits online). In the email, Jason notes that he’s been flooded with thousands of phone calls and has since changed his phone number. In a followup post to that message board, he states clearly he wants to capitalize on the controversy: “Let’s milk this. All the way… There must be a way to combine this. Into money. Money is important. Money is good.” He’s planning on setting up a dedicated website for his exploits, either on his Rfjason.com site or on the Craigslistsexbaits.com domain registered by Tucker Max.

He also distances himself from Encyclopedia Dramatica, claiming that they scraped his Livejournal and that he has little control over the site, but is “working to get the personally identifiably information redacted.” (This doesn’t make sense, since he claims to have editing rights on the protected page.) For more information, read the complete set of his posts and his friend Wendy Miller.

Update 3: My site’s been down for the last hour, but it was completely unrelated to this entry or the recent Slashdotting. EV1 Servers, my usually reliable web host, had an hour of downtime affecting hundreds of thousands of websites.

Update 4: The Associated Press just published an article, which will be syndicated in newspapers everywhere tomorrow. Some good quotes from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, Kurt Opsahl from the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and the ubiquitous Jonathan Zittrain.

Also, a couple more interesting comments from the Slashdot thread from people who claim to know Fortuny in real life. The first from someone who went to high school with him, and the second from an anonymous former friend.

September 12: For unknown reasons, the entire thread from the Tucker Max message board was removed along with Jason Fortuny’s username. Fortunately, Yahoo cached the thread. Fortuny’s most interest post is quoted below, in case the cache disappears. Fortuny writes:

This is some next level shit. I keep hearing Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat” lyrics in my head over and over.

1. Let’s milk this. All the way. When I’m in my element, there’s no limit to the shit I can stir up, so there’s more material to be had. I like entertaining. I like good attention. I’ve always wanted to have a late night talk show. Letterman is my fucking hero. Stupid people drive me insane and make me very animated. There must be a way to combine this. Into money. Money is important. Money is good.

2. I removed the posts from my website, rfjason.com, after the 1st day because I couldn’t handle the traffic. The good people at Encyclopedia Dramatica (friends of mine) scraped the content, and turned it into a formal wiki. While I have editing rights, I am not a staff member of, nor do I have any control over ED. They are a very separate entity. I am working to get the personally identifiably information redacted. Hopefully they’ll be nice, but I suspect I’ll have to buy some pixel ads or some such shit.

3. Let’s go for craigslistsexbait.com. I’m not sure how this functions compared to rfjason.com, my regular site that everyone is linking to. (Note: rfjason.com is also my business site that had a non-professional personal.rfjason.com tacked on. I have since pulled the business element and put my shitty ass non-professional stuff front & center, because I detest the idea of admitting internet defeat with a blank site.)

4. I have no head for business in this arena. Sure, I can tell you all about the best ways to handle eCommerce and customer service standards, how to build a solid web server, and (LOL) privacy, but the notoriety business is new. I require the help of Rudius Media. Let’s get that rolling.

5. The lawsuits may or may not happen. I have e-lawyers arguing all over the place both sides of the issue. CL’s tos clause 3. CONTENT could be interpreted that there’s no expectation of privacy, depending on how intelligently you argue the case. Since I’m apparently a sociopath, I could argue this pretty well. But I’m not a lawyer. Is there any lawyer in Washington who wouldn’t laugh this out of his court?

6. Now that I’m going to be a big star, here’s a naked picture of me with solar flares coming out of my ass (nsfwahd): http://rfjason.com/temp/solarass.jpg

Have I missed anything?

It’s also worth noting that Fortuny has been noticeably quiet over the past couple days. He’s posted a couple Livejournal comments, but no new entries since Sunday afternoon. Also, MSNBC covered this on air today (here’s the video).

September 13: My good friend Lou posted an exhaustive and very personal profile of Fortuny based on his online writings. Highly recommended reading, and gives quite a bit of insight into his possible motivations.

September 14: Jason’s been laying low for days. A llocal news station actually interviewed one of the guys, whose embarrassment seems to be trumped by two minutes of on-air fame. Unless there’s a lawsuit or a lynching, I think I’m pretty much done with this story.

September 18: Lou Cabron breaks the story of a copycat scammer named Michael Crook, who has posted multiple ads to various Craigslist cities. Unlike Fortuny’s ad, this one was pretty mild, without graphic photos or a fetish angle. Michael is now posting the responses to a new site called Craigslist-Perverts.org, often researching the identities of each respondent.

September 24: Jason Fortuny responds in an informal 29-minute video interview. Lou Cabron from 10 Zen Monkeys wrote up an excellent summary of the interesting parts to save you the trouble of watching it. Despite all the threats, according to Fortuny, he hasn’t received a lawsuit, or even a cease-and-desist letter.

August 5, 2008: Two years later, and shortly after his New York Times interview, Jason Fortuny was sued for his Craigslist experiment.

April 18, 2009: Jason Fortuny lost his court case and was ordered to pay $74k to the anonymous plaintiff.

Over Labor Day weekend, I got around to finishing Half Life 2: Episode One, the deeply satisfying expansion pack that picks up the storyline of Gordon Freeman as he tries to escape from City 17.

As great as the game was, I was blown away by the in-game Developer Commentary system. Each bit of audio is a “commentary node,” a little floating speech icon that can be activated by aiming at it and hitting the “use” button. The dialogue then plays, with additional information about who’s speaking and the length of the clip. (See videos below.)

Most of the game’s 115 nodes are audio only, pointing out interesting tidbits about the scene you’re currently in, such as the visual design, character dialogue, or gameplay. Some of the best examples discuss the iterations a stage or puzzle went through, why original versions didn’t live up to expectations, and how they reached their final design. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the minds of the developers, very much like sitting next to them as you play through at your own pace.

But a few commentary nodes do much more, taking over the player’s view to show them something hidden or entirely new. I’ve captured video from some of my favorites.

Here, in the Citadel’s Core control room, you can see three separate commentary nodes. The first two were from earlier in the game, referring to the first time I was in this room. The third node — my favorite of the game — whisks you away to an entirely hidden part of the map to explain how real-time TV displays are made. Note how the color of the third icon changes after it’s activated, marking itself like unread-to-read mail.

In this turret scene, the first commentary node explains Alyx’s behavior and how the turret design was modified after playtesters complained. The second turns on a hidden “node graph” layer and discusses how designers can use it to improve NPC’s movement and combat. Note that the player is invulnerable to damage for the duration of each clip, so as not to distract from gameplay.

This final video explains Alyx’s dynamic fighting animations by taking over the player’s perspective and cloning multiple copies of Alyx and a zombie, which creates a Mortal Kombat-style walkthrough of several variations. Fun!

There have been a couple earlier attempts at in-game commentary, most notably the “Developer’s Cut” of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004), a game that sounds awful but is widely considered one of the best modern first-person shooters. Valve was clearly inspired by Riddick, but has refined and improved the idea, making it so vital and interesting that it easily added four hours of replay value to my $20 purchase.

Sadly, according to Valve’s game statistics, only 15% of players have ever turned it on. So, try it out and help raise that number (it’s buried in the audio options). I really hope this feature becomes more popular in new games, or even as special edition reissues for older games. Hearing the original developers discuss, in context, games like Ico, Deus Ex, or (gasp!) Day of the Tentacle would be a dream.

Also, if you’ve finished HL2:EP1, this 47-minute fan-made commentary is thoughtful and funny. Highly recommended.

Nearly two years ago, as part of my ongoing Metafilter Statistics project, I decided to see which websites the Metafilter community was linking to most frequently. With Matt Haughey’s help, I analyzed a complete dump of every post and came up with this list.

Now, two years later, I ran it again. Some of the results are surprising, as you can see below.

In the space of two years, YouTube launched and became the 15th most popular site, Flickr jumped 2,400 places to #14, and Wikipedia went from #66 to #2. Other big winners included Ask Metafilter, Times Online, Archive.org, and MSNBC. Huge losers that fell off the Top 50 entirely were Nandotimes.com (stopped publishing), News.cnet.com (changed domains), Observer.co.uk, and ZDnet.com.

Update: Some people in the Metatalk thread had questions about my methodology. The number next to each link is the jump in rank from the 2002 list. I’m only counting links in the front-page post itself, not the comments. And in the complete list, I’m excluding the 26,123 sources with only one link to conserve space.

If you happen to be at the Webvisions conference in Portland this week, you should come by my session Thursday afternoon.

I’ve been to several tech conferences in the last six months, and I can’t count the times I’ve been disappointed to find that a presentation that sounds interesting is either deadly boring or a poorly-disguised product pitch. Even when I was on the advisory board for the last Emerging Technology conference, I was surprised at how often the exciting pitches we approved ended up in lackluster talks.

So, when I was asked to speak, I tried to make a presentation that I would personally want to watch. I picked a topic I cared about and researched it to death — library research, original interviews, and plenty of web dumpster diving. It was a blast, and reminded me of what I missed most about college.

The topic: I’ll be speaking about how and why virtual communities meet in real life, from ham radio to modern online communities. It’s a topic that’s interested me since the BBS era, which I’ll also be touching on. I’m very deliberately not talking about Upcoming.org or anything else Yahoo-related.

Whether it’ll actually be interesting to anyone else but me is up in the air. This is my first solo conference talk and I’m terribly nervous. Hopefully, I’ll be able to hide it well enough so that the material doesn’t suffer. Anyway, I’ll link to responses as they come in after my session, so wish me luck!

July 21: This is my first Webvisions, and it strikes me as both very intimate and very well-run. My talk went very well. So many people have asked to see my slides that I’m going to write up some of my research and do a screencast of my talk.

Some reviews: Brian Oberkirch, Adam Darowski, Paul Bausch, Jeremiah Owyang.

California Extreme, the awkwardly-named yearly arcade/pinball show, comes to San Jose’s Parkside Hall again this weekend. I’ve been going for nearly a decade, and let me say (again) that this is the best thing ever. The world’s biggest 1980s-era arcade, filled with old favorites and many you’ve never heard of, all set on free play. (If the Flickr photos don’t get you drooling, then move along.)

Plus, the speakers they’ve lined up this year are great. Eugene Jarvis (creator of Defender, NARC, and Cruis’n USA) will be talking about the making of Robotron, Kevin Tiell will be showing his pinball’s-eye-view photography, and director Greg Maletic will be screening parts of his Future of Pinball documentary.

If you’re going, feel free to join the Upcoming event or leave a comment to let me know. I’ll be there all day tomorrow, so if you see me, say hi.

Update: The show gets better every year. My highlights, before I forget them:

• Panic Park. One of the funnest arcade games I’ve ever played. The goal of this Japanese two-player import is to shove your opponent around in a number of great minigames. The controls are like two big cushioned levers, which you throw your entire weight against to move your character around onscreen. Tilt your head sideways and watch this video to get the idea.
• Multi-Pac. This 24-in-1 Pac-Man hack created by Clay Cowgill is no longer available because of legal issues. With its crazy boot menu and hacked graphics, you feel naughty playing it. The one I tried appeared to be a different romset, as it had one Pac-Man variation called “Pacman Berzerk,” which used characters and animations from Berzerk Retro arcade mashup!
• Metal Slug X. I completed this remixed and upgraded version of Metal Slug 2, which took around 30 minutes. Exaggerated cartoon violence with a sense of humor and a ridiculous amount of on-screen action, it was very clearly a huge influence on Paul Robertson for Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.
• Bumper. Released in 1936, Bally’s “Bumper” was the first pinball game to use bumpers on the playfield. Funny enough, early pinball machines wouldn’t get flippers for another 11 years, until Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty in 1947. Until then, gameplay was limited to shooting the balls and watching them fall. If you want to see it for yourself, Bumper can be found at the Lucky Ju Ju pinball gallery in Alameda
• Warlords. I forgot how fun Warlords could be with four players at a cocktail (tabletop) cabinet.
• The Irritating Maze. Use a trackball to maneuver through a playing field with electrified walls. Touch the walls and a buzzer sounds, blasting a jet of air in your face. Irritating, but in a good way.
• Prop Cycle. By the time I beat the Story mode, I was sweating from pedaling the stationary bicycle, but the built-in fans kept me cool and added a little immersion. Despite some severe clipping problems and awkward controls, it still felt like I was flying a bike through the air.
• Older, underrated favorites: Quantum, Wacko, Puzz Loop

Two years old already! Not just walking and talking, but singing, conversing, drawing, counting (to two), playing drums, laughing at my jokes, and running to hug me when I walk in the door. I thought having a two-year-old would make me feel old, but it’s like being a kid again. Happy birthday, Eliot!

For the past couple of years, I’ve tried to highlight the best underdog games at E3, but this year was particularly hard. Partly because I spent most of the day waiting in line to see the Nintendo Wii, but also partly because the entire gaming industry is getting so weird. In catering to the casual gamer and trying to differentiate from the competition, every platform and publisher is spending serious money turning former underdogs into big-name titles.

I saw this trend everywhere at E3, but nowhere more prominent than Nintendo, which threw all the rules out the window with the Wii. The new controller forced every developer to invent new forms of interaction without relying on existing standards, so practically everything in Nintendo’s booth felt new and weird. Even the well-worn Tony Hawk series feels new and interesting when you’re waving your hands all over the place, though it doesn’t seem nearly as well-suited for epics like Zelda.

Beyond Nintendo, I was surprised to see games like Loco Roco and Viva Piñata with huge marketing efforts by Sony and Microsoft. (What hath Katamari wrought?) At this point, it’s hard to say that many of this year’s picks are true underdogs, but they’re all odd. If you want real underdogs, the indie gaming scene is thriving and almost completely unrepresented on the exhibit floor. Anyway, here are picks for the E3 Underdogs of 2006.

If you’re going to videotape your Star Wars fighting skills on a school camera, remember to remove the cassette when you’re done. Watch this embarrassingly good video.

(Some context may be necessary.)

Like every year, I’ll be rounding up my favorite pranks on Internet Jackass Day (aka April Fool’s Day). In case you’re thinking of getting involved, Anil’s got some advice for you. We’re a day early, but it’s April 1 somewhere, so let’s get started.

* ThinkGeek’s annual lineup of unusual new products

* Flickr goes catty on all “Explore” pages, in a timezone-sensitive hack; some screenshots

* Google Adwords unveils two new image sizes

* Google Rooms

* Bioengineering firm to create pet dragons

* Slashdot finds its feminine side (yawn!)

* Ask.com’s RhymeRank

* Yelp buys rights to the Pets.com sock puppet

* Bungie’s Pimps at Sea video game

* Yahoo buys Web 2.0, all of it

* Ars Technica reviews Duke Nukem Forever

* Google Romance (though Google isn’t far off entering the personals market, in reality)

* TeeVeePedia: TeeVee’s 10th annual entry carries on their tradition of the best written pranks ever

* SQL on Rails, don’t miss the screencast

* Gamespot previews World of Starcraft, among other news coverage

* Google Earth adds some visitors to Area 51

* Wordpattern, WordPress merges with Textpattern

* LinkFilter cribs Metafilter’s design

* Homestar Runner goes upside-down

* DeviantArt previews new Web 2.0 redesign

Comprehensive lists: If you feel like drinking from the firehose, try Urgo’s definitive list and Wikipedia’s rapidly-growing collection. As Greg put it, be prepared for “less than half-assed humor.”

Conclusion: Eh. The only two that made me laugh were the Flickr cats and SQL on Rails.

I suppose it was inevitable, but I got a cease-and-desist from Bill Cosby’s legal team for hosting the House of Cosbys videos and the out-of-print “Cosby Talks to Kids about Drugs” album. (View the cease-and-desist PDF.)

I’ve removed the album (even though it’s been out-of-print for as long as I’ve been alive), as that’s within their legal rights.

But I’m not removing House of Cosbys. House of Cosbys is parody, and clearly falls under fair use guidelines. I’m not taking it down, and their legal bullying isn’t going to work. They claim that hosting these videos “violates our client’s rights of publicity as well as other statutory and common laws prohibiting the misappropriation of an individual’s name, voice and likeness and unfair competition.” Sorry, but the First Amendment protects satire and parody of a public figure as free speech. Also, the right of publicity only applies to unauthorized commercial use, and not a work of art or entertainment.

More than anything, this strikes me as a special kind of discrimination against amateur creators on the Internet. Mad Magazine, Saturday Night Live, South Park, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and countless other mainstream media sources have parodied Bill Cosby over the years (see growing list below).

But because it takes so little effort to threaten a small web-based artist (or the blogger who hosts their work), the Net is constantly targeted regardless of just cause. Justin Roiland, creator of House of Cosbys, was forced to remove the videos because he couldn’t risk the possibility of an actual lawsuit. And when Channel 101 decided to take a stand, Cosby’s lawyers targeted their ISP instead, forcing the videos offline. (Read Channel 101’s excellent response.)

But I know my legal standing, and I’m not backing down unless ordered by the court. This is free speech and creative freedom, and even though it’s just one guy’s goofy labor of love, that’s worth fighting for, dammit.

Cosby Parody in the Media

This is hardly the first time Cosby’s been parodied in the mainstream media. If you have other mainstream examples, please post them or email them to me! Scans, recordings, and video clips are highly encouraged.

* Video: Cosby on Family Guy (July 18, 2001)

* Video: Cosby on The Simpsons (WMV, May 13, 2001)

* Video: Cosby on the Simpsons (Quicktime, April 30, 1995)

* Video: Saturday Night Live’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” (May 14, 2005) – Bill Cosby has been parodied on at least nine episodes of SNL by three different cast members: Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and Kenan Thompson. Any other clips?

* Video: The Boondocks (Episode 11, “Let’s Nab Oprah”)

* Comics: Mad Magazine appearances – Wow, Michael Hunziker compiled a collection of 12 Cosby appearances in Mad from 1967-1998!

* Video: South Park, Episode 210 (“Clubhouses”)

* Video: South Park, Episode 512 (“Here Comes the Neighborhood”)

House of Cosbys: Mirrors Clones!

Watch the original House of Cosbys at any of the sites below. We really need more mirrors, so let me know if you’ve mirrored it!

* Google Video

* YouTube

* Download.com

* CommonFlix (BitTorrent, formatted for iPod)

* EOD.com (thanks, Greg!)

* Watching Paint Dry (thanks, Alek!)

* Stroeck.com (thanks, Michael!)

* Nonstuff.com (thanks, Robert!)

* I’m Just Sayin’ (thanks, Krup!)

* 1hug.com (thanks, David!)

* Panoptican (thanks, Jason!)

* R3V.com (thanks, cls!)

* I Eat Tapes (thanks, David!)

* Kaninka.net (thanks, Páll!)

* Waxy.org

Updates

Stay tuned. I’m calling the EFF and House of Cosbys creator Justin Roiland today.

Update: I was just interviewed by the New York Times for an article set to appear in their Monday business section. Journalist Lia Miller also interviewed Channel 101’s Dan Harmon for the article, but was unable to get a comment from Bill Cosby.

I also spoke to Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He contacted me directly, providing some great feedback and offering the EFF’s support to help fight this. Their network of legal counsel is extensive and well-versed in cases like these, and the EFF’s powerful activist community will help raise awareness should this go to trial.

No word yet from Justin Roiland, but waiting patiently. Justin, if you’re out there, call or e-mail me! I got in touch with Justin through Myspace. He’s giving me a call on Monday to discuss.

March 5: The New York Times article is out. Nice!

March 7: I spoke to Justin yesterday afternoon. I was relieved to hear he’s not opposed to what I’m doing, though (rightfully so) he’s hesitant to get involved in a lawsuit himself. He’s going to speak to an attorney and get back to me.

Also, no word yet from the Cosby legal team.