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Comment by joshuawright11 | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, are there any sort of legal rights or entitlements for people who share memes/funny pictures on social media?

I don't disagree that FuckJerry's behavior is pretty shady, but cmon... the entire meme community is pretty much built on reposts. Isn't that the whole point of sharing stuff on social media. Why are people acting so entitled? Seems to me they just saw the huge revenue pie and want a piece.

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Yes there's definitely some moral gray area here (forgetting about the legality for a moment), which the article sort of mentioned. This isn't some dude reposting memes for the lulz. The dude's signing deals with Viacom for posts at more than $30k a pop; all off the backs of actual creators. On the flip side, where do you draw the line?

>where do you draw the line?

How about the internet? Once you publicly share something on the world wide web, you have crossed that line because anyone can then simply copy and paste. It's naive to expect otherwise.

I suppose you also think people who leave a lawn gnome outside when they live in a high traffic area are just asking to be vandalized? Opportunity is no excuse for theft.

Nope! Thats a physical thing that can't be "copy and pasted". If someone takes it from you, you no longer have it, so that's why it's "stealing".

Digital things are infinitely reproducible and cost nothing to copy and paste.

When someone copies and pastes something you shared with the entire world on the internet, you still have that thing.

Copy & pasting digital things != stealing physical things.

That's not the point dude, it's wrong. It's not yours, and you don't have the right to do whatever you want with other people's property, because "you can" or "it's easy"

The meme community generally accepts that "as long as you credit source, you're golden". This was a big issue with the Fat Jewish(among others) years ago, and he hand to bend the knee and apologize for joke theft and start crediting.

FuckJerry is just the perfect shitstorm of bad optics. They put out an image of douche-bro behavior (I mean, look at their name) and one of their biggest claims to infamy is being the marketing team behind Fyre fest. They're whole response to every scandal has been "you're a jealous idiot, and our legal team is more powerful than yours so eat shit".

What we're seeing right now is the community holding someone accountable. You can argue fairness, or free speech til the cows come home on both sides, but in the end the ball is rolling and we just have to wait and see where it stops.

Also >>"Why are people acting so entitled? Seems to me they just saw the huge revenue pie and want a piece."

Yes. Why would these entitled CONTENT CREATORS want to be compensated by people using their content for commercial gains?! What a bunch of entitled babies. They should be happy for the exposure. /s

In the United States, at least, if you're the original creator of something, copyright to that work gets assigned to you automatically when you create it (see https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork). So if someone uses that work without your permission. you have a theoretical legal complaint against them.

Actually pursuing that complaint can be difficult and expensive, though, which is what serial plagiarists like FJ depend on.

There is no stopping meme accounts and I do see 'original creators' getting upset at the lack of credit in the reposts. The most common answer is, if you care, watermark your work.

I've got buddies on Instagram that watermark their work and when it gets stolen do you think people are going to look at the watermark and go follow them? It doesn't do anything for the original creator on Instagram.

Perhaps the problem is that the watermark itself does not function as a link? If the platform wanted to, it could treat any "registered" watermark as a link to the original poster on that same platform. This wouldn't help when the watermark gets cropped or scrambled, but that's more work... maybe there is room in the jpeg file for an "invisible" canonical link to be encoded? If not then future image formats should totally do this.

The problem is that "curators" like FJ will just crop out the watermark.

That's what makes these accounts so uniquely infuriating. They're not accidentally omitting credit out of laziness or ignorance. They do extra work to make sure the original creator gets cut out of the loop.

And, hell, if you see your work being reposted without permission, file a DMCA claim against it. Might as well get some good use out of that horrid law.

If I put my work into a private git repository or dropbox or similar solution before posting it online, and then FJ steals it I guess that might be worth more as proof than a watermark. If I am in fact an original creator of content that is.

Maybe it would be worthwhile creating a service that did this. Although I think it is probably more like a feature of another service.

A big part of the issue is making sure that people see the work know who the creator is, and for the repost to drive traffic to the creator. Having proof on an external repository doesn't do anything for this.

having the work and proof of creation before the other work was published or put online would be proof for a court case however.

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