I’ve really been wanting to post about this topic, but Blog@Newsarama has done it way better than I ever could. I’m also posting this because of a little thing known as FREE SPEECH. So here is what Blog@ had to say:

I’ve deliberately avoided talking about the whole Todd Goldman mess up ’til now, mainly because it’s such an unbelievable clusteryouknowwhat that I knew it would take more blogging power than poor little me could muster. But now, circumstances compel me to speak up, namely because other people are being told to shut up.

But first, a bit of background. Todd Goldman is the designing wizard behind David & Goliath, a multi-million dollar company that designs T-shirts and other apparel you find at places like Hot Topic. The folks at the Something Awful forums noticed a strong similarity between one of his cartoons and one by David Kelly.

And how did Mr. Goldman respond to these charges? Why, by calling Kelly a pedophile. What a nice fellow! Of course, this just encouraged a bunch of Internet-savvy folks to discover many, many more instances of David & Goliath designs that look very similar to other people’s designs. You can see a long list of the alleged thievery here (warning: it’s not a pretty sight).

Now it appears Goldman has decided to stop the nasty name-calling and sic his lawyers on anyone who dares talk about him or his high-quality, certainly-not-stolen designs. Already a number of Web sites have reportedly received “cease and desist” letters (you can read Fleen’s here) and a few sites have taken down their articles about the affair, including Wired, Juxtapoz and The Beat. Without casting any aspersions on Heidi or Publisher’s Weekly, I find it very disturbing when someone accused of stealing feels they can bully their way out of trouble.

Want to learn more? Yeah, me neither, but why should I suffer alone? You can find out much more about the Goldman scandal here, here, here and here. You can buy a funny T-shirt mocking him here. You can read an amusing, apocryphal story about him here.

’nuff said.