Article 1, section 8 tells us that it is our government’s duty to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” And, as the Supreme Court noted in seminal fair use case Campbell v Acuff-Rose, it was apparent even to our founding fathers that some idea of fair use is necessary to fulfill the purpose of promoting arts and sciences. Part of the Copyright Act, the fair use doctrine codifies into law the idea that you can, in fact, take someone’s original work without permission, and lays out four factors to determine when doing so is acceptable.įirst, some background: The idea of copyright is, somewhat surprisingly, actually written into the Constitution. The most important piece of law to meme-creators is the Fair Use Doctrine. Below, we discuss some of the important legal doctrines to meme-makers, and cases that may be applicable.

But you, meme-maker, are smarter than that, and you want to educate as much as possible on the industry you have chosen. Intellectual property jurisprudence has yet to really confront the internet’s ecosystem of decentralized content creation. They respond by telling you “this is the internet.” Good job.Īnd then someone steals one of your memes for their own page, and they delete your watermark, and try to pass off your meme as their own. You have managed to create a career for yourself just by being Very Online and humorous, and we are all jealous of you. Everything is going great: you’re racking up thousands of followers per day, each post getting hundreds of thousands of likes-life is good. So you have a popular Instagram account on which you post original memes for mass consumption and potential monetization. You should contact an attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem.

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