Maybe it's because I'm not trying to market anything myself, but I have no respect at all for reposters. Further, I think reposters should never be called "curators" and to confuse the two is just giving power/legitimacy to the reposters.
I dream of the day where there is an original content only Instagram. It will never happen in reality, but I spend a small percentage of my week submitting copyright requests to Instagram. They are surprisingly responsive, but the monstrous aggregation accounts are a plague that I shouldn't have to waste time with.
Seems to me that disgust for the practice grows exponentially with reposter's audience size. If I see something worth resharing with friends, I'd never consider Instagram as an outlet to do so. Instead, I opt for a personal sharing channel like a DM or iMessage thread.
I think intent and circumstances matter. If you have a private account and only allow people you know to follow you, and you repost something, that's a lot different from having a public account where your purpose is to amass followers and try to monetize.
Eric Bauman is a great case study as eBaumsWorld has lived its full life cycle and he was one of the first 3rd party aggregation pirates that reached international success.
Although that was initially my feelings (when an account steals my content, I would view their account size and get pissed when they had more followers than me) but now I feel equally pissed at every account that steals my content. If it's a legitimate account that's sharing it i'm fine, but if it's an account that only shares other peoples posts, I report and block them. They shouldn't be able to make money from other peoples posts.
Instagram should at least attempt to do something about this issue other than relying on users to report them. All of these accounts have similar patterns on how they operate. They shouldn't be too difficult to find.
Internet comedian Vic Berger made a parody video clowning on FuckJerry and exposing their theft of comedian's material. These guys dismiss requests or pleas from content creators to (at least) please put creators' names on the material that they re-post. So predictably, one of the FuckJerry team (their chief content officer James Ryan Ohliger aka “Krispyshorts”) filed a false DMCA on the video and had it pulled from YouTube. Here is that video: https://vimeo.com/315339461
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.
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?
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.
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.
[..]A meme (/miːm/ MEEM[1][2][3]) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[5]
Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[6][..]
You are conflating two different things. Originally memes (the notion of idea + transmissibility) with analogy to genes. And image macros and other internet frippery.
I understand. I know memes as in Dawkins’ ‘meme’..but isn’t it the same principle..if it isn’t viral, then it doesn’t live it’s purpose? Hence, Not A Meme.
Instagram's IP guidelines are a complete joke. Go deep enough down the rabbit hole and you're going to find a bunch of accounts doing nothing but reposting memes, images from video games, and video clips from TV shows.
You really don't need to go deep at all. Much like Facebook and Twitter, a very large chunk of the most popular accounts just shamelessly steal other people's content.
It'd be hard for them to prove that they were the originator of the meme, simply because there is no 'reverse image search' for a meme template; they're designed to be as generic as possible, so that you can mark it up with text that's relatable to your audience.
As an end user, I'm happy that curators exist. Not talking about this "Fuck Jerry" individual in particular, but I follow many meme accounts that just repost stuff, and they are great value for me, because I don't want to, instead, follow thousands of creators and have to scroll through thousands of posts that aren't really that good.
As a user with a decent amount of followers(almost 28k), all of these accounts make me angry. I spend so much time filming and editing posts only for some T-shirt woodworking account to steal it and gain more followers than me. I don't care what size the account is that is sharing it. I report them and block them. These accounts are stealing content and making money from stolen content. It makes me sick seeing these accounts have #ad in posts because I know they didn't work hard to get where they are.
I would expect that reporting them doesn't do all that much, since Instagram doesn't really have an incentive to make that right for you (unless, of course, you're a large content creator with a ton of followers; in that case, I'm sure Instagram does want to keep you happy).
Instead, file a DMCA takedown notice with Instagram referencing the stolen work. They're required by law to comply and take it down. I expect that most content thieves won't see it as worth it to contest the takedown and open themselves up to legal liability.
Not true at all, I've reported MANY of my unauthorized posts and all have been swiftly dealt with by Instagram. In my experience, they take it seriously when you provide proof of your post, and theirs.
I agree that there's some value to curation. It'd be nice to see it built in as a first-class feature. Let someone repost, but automatically credit the original poster. Also maybe do some sort of revenue split on ads. 30% to the curator and 70% to the original creator or something along those lines.
