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.
