The Maker of the Trollface Meme
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
I half expected the post date to be April 1 (it wasn't), or for the last line of the article to be "And if you believed a word of the above, here's an image for you:" (it wasn't).
Still kind of weird because it more or less belongs to "the people" and everybody uses it, but if someone is profiting from it, I don't see a problem with him getting a share.
Exactly. An image that is free for non-commercial use requires you to think whether your use is really non-commercial in nature, which is too much of a cognitive burden, so you go and pick another one.
Moreover, this image wouldn't actually be famous if not for the number of people who profited on it already - namely, all that image sharing sites that have ads on them.
What does that even mean? No image or any art is "licence-free" unless author explicitly states so. That's the basis of copyright, your creations are yours (unless you give them away). Publishing your work doesn't change anything.
"The next day, though, Ramirez was merely pleased to see others sharing his one-off doodle. In the anonymous world of 4chan, having other people recognize your contribution felt good."
He clearly didn't have any issue with that, and without any license posted, that was already a violation wasn't it? They shared his work without stating the author and without his permission. Yet he was happy about that, until he smelled some money.
It's like if you would put a basket of candies, some people approach you and try to take it, and you're like "sure, take it, I'm glad you like it". And this keeps on for a while. And then some guy in a suite comes in and takes one candy like so many others. At which point you start running after him shouting "THIEF! He stole my candy!"
Yes, he's suing people who are using his artwork to make money for themselves. Why do you think that is a problem and why do you think they shouldn't pay him a cut for using his artwork?
Law is on his side, so they should pay. My problem is just with him changing his mind at some point. Not defending his rights from the start and even being happy about them being broken could suggest that he meant it to be free. And as others mentioned, there's no chance that it would have any value whatsoever if it wasn't.
E.g. company X puts some small open source code online (yes, nowadays nobody would touch it without a license). People modify it, improve it, share it, build on top of it. Company X often tweets "awesome to see how our code spreads and all fantastic usages of it". And then after some time it sues.
i.e. as others mentioned, this picture would have no value if it would not (assumed to) be in public domain and without all thousands comics and memes done on top of it.
What is at issue here is the copyright, not the trademark. Trademarks must be actively enforced or they are lost. Copyrights must merely be registered (which was done in this case) and can be enforced essentially whenever the rights owner chooses to enforce.
The purpose of copyright is to protect the creator's right to profit from his creation. It's fine that he didn't go after the initial copiers on 4chan--they weren't profiting from copying the troll face. If you had RTFA, you would know that he's only going after those that are earning income (i.e., charging money) from using his creation, which is perfectly fine, legally and morally.
Can you clarify why you think the person repackaging the candy in this situation has a moral highground? Why are they not also "smelling some money"?
Well to me the person that got the candy for free, owns that candy now and can do whatever she wants with it (throw it away, eat it, give it, sell it). She owns that candy and can make a decision. Earlier the person giving away those candies owned them and he decided to give them away for free.
So yeah it seems to me like a similar situation. Person later coming after you saying "Hey I gave you this candy for free, you cannot sell it".
I know that with copyrights it's different and yes you really cannot sell that free candy. It just subjectively feels wrong to me because of him changing his opinion only after it become part of the internet (based on the fact that it was assumed to be public domain, free to share and include anywhere)
Don't really understand this logic.
Whatever he decided back then, he has all the rights in the world, including the legal right, to change his mind.
You might it sound like giving something away at first and then deciding to charge for it is immoral or something.
Of course its even more likely that he didn't really "decide" anything at the start, in the sense that he hadn't had in his mind the impossible to him at the time scenario of companies using his sketch et al. Only after it happened he decided he should get some money off of it, it's not like he had a bait and switch plan all along.
Which some people might believe as part of the unwritten rules. For example, see both Open Source and Free Software (as defined by the OSI and FSF, respectively), which state that licenses must allow the users to sell the works. The idea that doing stuff for profit is fundamentally different is far from unanimously accepted.
I know casual copyright infringement is the norm on the internet (eg, distributing images from god knows where), and maybe that's okay, but you've certainly crossed an ethical line when you've started selling it without permission.
> Image Credit: Adam Sandler (Unknown, please let me know!)
The value of the image is 99.9% associations it aquired thanks to the "copyright is bad" culture using it under assumption that it is public domain.
Changing it now is bad style, and it sets bad example for others that may take this further. I know slippery slope isn't a very strong argument, but it is still valid concern.
I wonder if 4chan should adopt GPL-like licencing.
The troll face would have NEVER become popular if it was not free to distribute in the first place. It's not this guy who made it popular by himself, it's the 4chan and subsequent communities who did - in that sense, what it became does not belong to him at all.
Many of the uses you describe are covered under Fair Use (and then therefore are not infringement).
It seems pretty darn similar to when a company is sued for GPL infringement, but no one cares about the little projects that gain no traction that are probably in technical violation of the license.
Note: not aggressive/flippant - I understand best through examples and hypotheticals. I am legitimately curious, because in my mind my original post seems a fair analogy to me and I want to know what I'm seeing differently than most of the commenters here.
I'm OK with that.
Someone is flat-out selling remixes of that meme. (hopefully just as a joke)
The original can be found on the linked site, but it's also on DA: http://whynne.deviantart.com/art/Comic-Trolls-98357844
From the description:
>It's trollface, not coolface, but call it what you like.
http://whynne.deviantart.com/art/Comic-Trolls-98357844?offse...
Cool face seemed to be posted first in 2008-12-01 and trollface somewhere in 2008.
But that doesn't matter that much since it was originally posted on 4chan and not DA.
Source : me and http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trollface-coolface-problem
Also, 4chan doesn't keep archives, how do we know he's the original author anyway?
If that were true, wouldn't every copyrighted image or torrent posted to 4chan automatically lose its copyright status? IANAL, but in the US at least, copyright is automatically held by the creator of a work whether or not it's explicitly licensed[0]. Posting something to a forum doesn't affect the rights held by the owner in any way, at best it just ignores them.
>Also, 4chan doesn't keep archives, how do we know he's the original author anyway? There are a ton of sites which keep archives of 4chan threads.
[0]http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-automatic.h...
It doesn't. A copyright holder can do whatever they want with their copyrighted content, including paste it to a free website, without losing their copyright. Only a legal document like a license or a contract can put a piece of copyrighted content into public domain before the copyright expires.
> If he copyrighted it after that, shouldn't people be able to use the version of the image they got before the copyright?
Copyright is created when content is created. You now hold a copyright on your comment, and I hold a copyright on my comment (this one you're reading right now).
I'm quoting your comment to provide commentary on it, which is a protected fair use. But if I took your comment and pasted it on a t-shirt, sold it for $20 per shirt and sold 100,000 of them, you would be within your rights to sue for a cut of that money.
> Also, 4chan doesn't keep archives, how do we know he's the original author anyway?
This is the sort of the thing that a court case will decide. He'll try to prove he is, and the defense will try to prove that he is not.