Merriam-Webster defines “meme” (pronounced “meem”) as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” originating in the same root as “imitation.” Richard Dawkins is credited as having coined the term in The Selfish Gene (1976). Memes are the units that transmit ideas, behaviors, styles and usage within a culture through a variety of media, like nursery rhymes passed down from parent to child. Says Dawkins, “[j]ust as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
The growth of the internet led to a new usage of the word (the meme of “meme”!) by Mike Godwin in Wired (1994), as an image or video that spreads via social media and other means “virally,” a term Dawkins also used to describe how memes replicate. Know Your Meme is a crowdsourced database of popular memes, owned by a company that created many early memes. Meme histories are tracked from first appearance, providing a reference of viral memes.
Memes and Copyright
Image-based memes involve, primarily, an image created by somebody. Sometimes the meme creator is also the image creator, but often, when involving movie stills or images of celebrities, the image’s copyright is owned by someone else. American copyright law gives creators the exclusive rights of reproduction, modification, distribution, performance, and display. The viral spread of a meme infringes on theses protections as the original image is modified and then displayed, distributed and reproduced when posted and reposted.
However, within copyright law exists the doctrine of fair use, which allows for use of a copyrighted work in the creation of new work without permission, as long as the use fits within certain parameters. A legal finding of fair use takes into account the following factors:
- The purpose of the use,
- The amount of the work to be used,
- The effect of the use on the market for or value of the original work, and
- The nature of the copyrighted work.
There is no official definitive answer for whether a use can be considered fair, as every case must be judged on its own merits, but there are some types of use generally allowed under fair use, including criticism and commentary, parody, journalism, education, and research.
When it comes to memes, an important issue is the amount used of the original work. In First World Problems: A Fair Use Analysis of Internet Memes (2013), Ronak Patel says the amount of the work used in the meme probably supports the meme creators if the image was a still of another work, usually making up a small percentage of the original, but not if the original work was a photograph in which the whole of the work was being used. Stacey M. Lantagne expands on this in Famous on the Internet: The Spectrum of Internet Memes and the Legal Challenge of Evolving Methods of Communication (2017), in which she identifies use ranging from “static,” a relatively straightforward reproduction of an image, to “mutating,” in which the role of the internet is directly responsible for the meme’s alteration from the original to the point that “[m]utating memes, because of their unique characteristics, are more like ideas,” thus unprotected under copyright. Dawkins acknowledged this point in 2013 when he observed that internet memes, unlike genes, were actively manipulated by human creativity to appear different from the original.
Lantagne and Patel agree on the inability of copyright law to fully address the subject of memes, given their cultural importance as what Lantagne calls “pure engines of expression with their own symbolic vocabulary” while also relying, in Patel’s words, on “massive unauthorized copying” to attain such importance.
