What Happens When You Piss Off the Internet
bufr.tumblr.com
bufr.tumblr.com
That is not the right thing to have learned from this. I suggest this one:
If you're going to take a bunch of ideas and content wholesale from a community for your new thing, it might be good if you engage with that community and make something that respects the context of the stuff you're taking, instead of making something they'll perceive as cheap and foreign.
You cannot 'engage with' the internet as a whole. No community owns a meme: it's the fact that so many people reproduce them that makes it a meme. The problem here is that some folks do feel they, or their community, own a meme. These people are the problem, not this guy with a place for a game. Or at least, he's another kind of problem.
If he had made a post on Reddit or talked to anyone on 4chan and said "I want to make a meme-themed iOS game, help me make it not suck" and listened, he probably would have wound up making something that did not entice people to mock him and insult him. That's what I mean about engaging.
This has nothing to do with "the internet" or Reddit, or 4chan or whatever. You try to do this with some local group of people that's involved in whatever kind of hobby or activity you consider weird, or "garbage", and you'll get more or less the same response.
If he had tried pulling together an open source development team nobody would have been seriously offended.
But what this guy is doing is the same as taking art done by anonymous street artists and selling merchandise based on it. If people pay before or after the production doesn't matter in that case. Acting totally surprised when "the street" is fighting back seems slightly naive.
> When I sought out on the endeavor to create a mobile tower defense game, I announced that the game would be open source, and it would be free.
What are you talking about?
In these communities, nobody cares about money, because your standing in the community isn't determined by how much money you have, but by how much you have contributed. This is kind of implicit in 4chan users, where it's considered tacky to even claim explicit ownership, because memes are understood to be products of an amorphous community. It's explicit on places like Reddit, where cultural standing is measured as a number.
Yes, the author would not be receiving money for this product, but having created the game as himself (as opposed to as, say, a semi-anonymous Newgrounds member) he draws more ire. Contrast the relevant videos: the original Kickstarter video features a single strong personality, a person mediating the experience of the memes in the game, while the response video is relatively anonymous, attempting to minimize the mediation between the viewer and his point. The fact that the response video also calls out other YouTube celebrities who do the same thing—i.e. offer mediation and commentary of other content through an explicit personality—should be incredibly telling.
Other comments that say things like, "I'd be honored to have my content featured in someone's game," are missing the point. It's a basic culture clash: the article's author expresses distinct authorship which can be traced to a concrete person (or persona), even if he gets no profit and open-sources the result, while the people who make up the response understand that authorship as contrary to the whole point of communal humor, i.e. memes. The other meme aggregation sites are also 'mediators' of a sort, preventing people from experiencing the direct product of the community.
You don't actually know what his towers were going to defend and it seems he was hiring artists to render instances of these memes to be defended. That there are individuals who are offended has nothing to do with 'their' content being ripped off. In fact, I doubt any of these people that send 'hatemail' ever were part of the initial creation of a meme. I doubt they ever put any effort into creating a reproduction of a meme, more than surfing to a website and entering a text that was automatically placed over an image. These people are just assholes and you shouldn't defend them.
Anyway, some guy started posting that we were fraudsters, were raping culture, etc. It's funny, our troll sounded just like yours -- obviously intelligent and articulate, but took something trivial (internet memes) way too seriously. I really can't understand the mindset of these people -- when I noticed that reddit was becoming a waste of time, I didn't post a long rant about it -- I just stopped going to reddit.
If it's any comfort, know that such people likely have little else going on in their life, and trolling in defence of their online "tribe" is all they have. If you're actually creating stuff, being entrepreneurial, putting yourself out there, you're already beating them.
1. On the internet large amounts of traffic means that you will have trolls galore. In my eyes some of those comments are normal internet fodder and just need to be moderated out.
2. You are using IP that you do not own. Memes are not public domain. Of course that is going to get people angry, particularly when there is money involved.
2. Even under fair use? How do sites like memegenerator, knowyourmeme, and others get away with it? They make money. My project was free.
Honestly though this is just couch-analytics from me. I'm not sure how copyright applies to meme pictures and am fascinated by related court cases. Anyone else have interesting meme/copyright-related court case suggestions?
If you're going to copy photos and paste funny text on them without considering whether you have legal rights to use the photo, then who am I to stop you? I like memes. But then if are going to cry "IP rights" when somebody else takes the same photo plus your funny text and uses it in some other way - then in my book you get filed under H for Hypocrite.
I think what that is, people showing their true colors about respect for other's work. If it's convenient to use something then it's fair-use and the IP owner can go screw himself. But if somebody takes OUR stuff, then bring the vengeance of the Internet upon thee with furious anger!
If it's fair use to put the text on the image in the first place, then it's fair use to use the image with the text. People can be upset all they want about it, but it's not going to change the fact that the entire spread of memes occurs without respect for (and in fact despite) copyright law.
A couple of years ago Hot Topic made a shirt using the "Rage Guy" face from 4chan. They responded by rebranding the "Rage Guy" as "Race Guy" making tons of racist comics featuring the image and then complaining to Hot Topic for supporting racism.[1]
1: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/race-guy
Unrelated Question:
What happens on kickstarter when you pledge a project, they get tons of money, and then they don't deliver? For example, what if this guy gets enough to begin but he sucks at coding and isn't able to deliver anything like what he promised? Or what if someone were to just pocket the kickstarter money and disappear?
This however makes it all the more a powerful concept in my mind, since the "makers" have to figure out how to communicate they are trustworthy AND have this great idea.
None of this sounds like he planned to make it free or open source at all. It sounds like he is trying to capitalize on intellectual property that he doesn't own the rights to.
"an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme
And who actually makes money from meme's anyway? Is YouTube scum for making money from showing video memes? Likewise for 4chan (the website, not the community) and Reddit? The advertisers that buy ads on those pages? What about memegenerators?
Double standards?
If you choose to put something creative out into the ether, you should have the expectation that if it's good there are going to be copies and other derivations. If you can't stomach this or can't afford legal counsel to enforce your IP, keep your creative works off the Internet.
The world is a better place because of "unsolicited collaboration".
I hope you find a way to make your game regardless of all the "original" people that think they are better somehow than those who are re-mixing to create something new with the culture they love.
To me it looks like awesome advertising, and it turns out that you got it for free, so why not just be happy? Ignore the trolls and see it from the bright side. =)
Regardless of their position on the matter, they are all attention whores.
CollegeHumor - Cashed out. EbaumsWorld - Cashed out. Knowyourmeme - Cashed out. The entire Cheezeburger network.
People draw some crappy pictures or take a crappy photo and slap an average joke over the top spread it around the internet and then get annoyed that someone puts it in a game?
Why aren't they going after the people who endlessly re-post these things?
Why does he want to smear poor, innocent garbage? At least garbage composts into something useful.
The problem with open source (especially anything involving the GNU) is that although you can make money, the majority (not all) will make it very difficult for you to do this.