Just as we were putting away the original Jason Fortuny Seattle Craigslist scandal, a copy-cat comes along and tries to run the same prank again. This time with "better" results (Better only in the sense that he is now getting sued).

This story started a few months ago when Jason Fortuny decided to put up a pretty intense women seeking men ad on Craigslist, then proceeded to publish the "results", people's phone numbers, names, IM, where they worked, etc. on his web page and asked other people who read his page to fill in any other information about them. He called this his "Craigslist Experiment" -- Boing-Boing has a much more detailed history of this project and Savage Love's take on this subject is particularly well written and insightful.

However, the story doesn't end there as copy cats started popping up, including one "Michael Crook" who, in an amazing bit of originality, did the exact same thing. Unfortunately for Mr. Crook, he had previously appeared on Fox news for another web page that he published (Forsake the Troops, no longer available) which called United States Soldiers some unflattering names, as well as stating that they were overpaid. During this Fox interview he seemed to appear a little disheveled.

Anyway, after 10 Zen Monkeys published this article which contained a picture of Mr. Crook from that Fox interview, their ISP received a copyright threat of action from Mr. Crook which basically required 10 Zen Monkey's web site to take the offending image off its web page. To make a long story short, Mr. Crook does not own the copyrighted material, because Fox News does, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now suing him for abusing copyright laws.

After spending time reading this, we really want to know two things. First, how does Mr. Crook morally justify, in his own mind, how it is not okay to put up a picture of him, when he has appeared on Fox News, but it is okay to publish pictures of people who responded to his origional craigslist posting? Because his response to this question (about half-way down the page). Smells. Rotten.

Secondly, of course, what was the offending picture? Well, Boing-boing, which is located in Canada and not subject to the same copyright restriction still has it up here.

Image from Google Talk