Memes and Copyright: Everything You Need To Know
We, the content marketers, are always on the lookout for trending stories, attention worthy news or sometimes even sad incidents. We leverage them to get some ‘second hand’ attention to our brands – well, there’s nothing to sugar coat about it. We create memes out of these trending stories. Remember Ahsneer Grover’s now famous quote – “Ye sab doglapan hai’? We the content marketers used that quote moment in so many memes to represent so many situations! Or, remember those Lord of The Rings memes? We use those clippings without obtaining any explicit licence from their creators. So the burning question is – Can memes be used for advertising? (legally)
We violate every copyright rule left, right and centre while indulging in meme marketing. Thankfully, not many people sue companies that use copyrighted materials for creating memes. But you never know which person or company might sue you for including their intellectual property in your meme! There are instances like that. Read on…
There are two copyright issues with memes:
- Copyright on the meme itself
- Copyright on the image, character or name of the person, and design used in the meme.
Copyright On Memes As a Whole
Although marketers use memes freely without thinking about copyright implications, not all memes are free to use. Most memes have no definitive creators behind them, but you CAN find some memes whose creators can be traced back to. However, most memes can’t be copyrighted by a single person. Here’s why. The basic features of memes are – a quirky image, a funny text and (sometimes) a separately made background. You’ll have a hard time finding a meme creator who owns copyright on all three things. The problem is elsewhere. Read on…
Copyright On The Images Used In Memes
The internet is a mysterious place. You post a photo one day and it can either get just a few eyeballs or it can blow up, get viral and be shared by millions of people. Once a quirky photo becomes viral, creative minded people change the context by adding humorous texts or contexts and give an altogether new meaning to the image. But the images still remain the property of the people who own them. So when someone makes a meme out of the image of Marvel’s Ironman, it’s Marvel that owns the image of Robert Downey Jr as Ironman. If Marvel wants, they can sue any company that uses the meme for commercial purposes.
The Story of Grumpy Cat and The Copyright Lawsuit
Back in 2012, a cat became famous! Why? Because she had a permanent ‘grumpy face’.
Here’s the photo of the famed cat –
(We haven’t uploaded the pic, this is just a link to the external Twitter image! See, we are smarty pants!)
The owner’s brother took a photo of the Grumpy Cat and posted it on Reddit. And boom! The image became viral with millions of shares and likes. Social media managers across the world started leveraging the image.
But the owners of the cat was smart enough to know her value. They created a company out of the dwarf cat – Grumpy Cat Limited. Today any company intending to use the cat’s image needs to attain a licence from the owners.
Grenade, a coffee company in the U.S obtained a licence to use the face of Grumpy Cat for a product named Grumppuccino. However, when the company used the image on the T-Shirts made by them, Grumpy Cat Limited sued them saying that they breached the contract. Ultimately, the coffee company had to shell out $710,000 to pay the owners of Grumpy Cat.
Getty Images too, sent a letter to a company demanding 785 Euros for using a meme with an image of a Penguin. That image is owned by Getty Images.
Back to India
Prithvi Shaw and The Case of Ambush Marketing
We, the marketers, always look for news about PV Sindhu winning a badminton tournament, Virat Kohli hitting a ton or Vishwanathan Anand defeating another Chess Grandmaster. But in our heart of hearts, we know that our urge to get engagement for our companies/clients outshines our happiness for these achievements by sportsmen. And so, we keep congratulating, keep making posts out of every single such achievement.
However most of these sportsmen protect their names and images with copyright. So, only those companies that obtain a licence to use their names and images can talk about them or post their images LEGALLY. So by congratulating these sportsmen when they do something good, we literally break the copyright law. This is what is known as Ambush Marketing. Thankfully, most of these sportspersons don’t care about these marketers. But…
Something great happened in the cricketing world in 2018. Prithvi Shaw became the youngest Indian to score a century on a test debut. The whole country was happy. But marketers were happier. They found another event to gain engagement!
- So Freecharge posted a drawing of a cricketer that looked like Prithvi and captioned it – “Supercharged Shaw.”
- And Swiggy wrote this: ‘Firsts we will remember forever. First bite of Rasmalai. First Prithvi Shaw innings.’
This time, unfortunately, the brand manager of Prithvi – Baseline Ventures – sued the two companies and demanded 1 crore Rupees! If you see it cursorily, you might find the claim outrageous. But think about it, if every company starts going this route, why would any company ever sign an advertising contract with Prithvi? That would not be exclusive in nature.
Myntra and The Curious Case of Clothing a Nude Ranveer Singh
Indian actor, Ranveer Singh, recently did a nude photoshoot to pay tribute to one of his favourite overseas actors. Obviously, the image grabbed the eyeballs of millions of people in India. As usual, marketers tried to cash in on this trending internet story. This is what we call moment marketing. Moment marketers make funny (sometimes congratulatory) memes out of any trend.
Myntra, leveraged the image of Ranveer Singh by posting a photoshopped picture where he is completely clothed with a printed shirt and a bright red pant. The caption read, ‘fixed it’.
Here’s the modified image by Myntra:
The problem is, it is most likely that Myntra didn’t obtain any licence to use the image. Yet, it obviously gained a huge engagement thanks to that doctored image. Fortunately, this time, nobody sued anybody!
Memes Posted By Companies Can’t Fall Under Fair Use
According to the Fair Use doctrine, you can only use copyrighted material (without paying) for the purposes of private use, research, criticism and review. In other words, you can’t freely use copyrighted media for commercial benefits. And on social media, engagement does result in commercial benefits for companies.
Fret Not: There Is a Solution
At Dimensions, we always focus on solutions. In this case, too, we have two solutions for you.
How Can Memes Be Used For Advertising Legally?
Solution 1: Use The Strategy Employed By Amul
Amul too leverages moment marketing. In fact, they go beyond the digital sphere and use print media to cash on trending stories. But, they do it smartly. They use caricatures that are not too similar to the actual person. And the usage of the names of celebrities is handled strategically. They don’t ever write the full names of the celebrities and they even tweak the first names of these celebrities.
Look at this image –
They gave a tribute to Rafel Nadal. Does the image look too similar to the actual photo of Rafael Nadal? We don’t think so!
Amul’s image has just 20 to 30 percent similarity with the actual image of Nadal. Also notice that it has not used the full name – Rafael Nadal.
The next image is interesting.
Amul leveraged P.V Sindhu’s fabulous winning of the Singapore Open Title in 2022. The personal brand of P.V Sindhu is managed by the same company – Baseline Ventures – that sued Swiggy for using Prithvi Shaw’s name!
Is the caricature too similar to how P.V Sindhu actually looks? No! And read the deftly handled copy – Sindhupore Open. And look at the textual post above – Amul just referred to her as “India’s badminton star”. There’s no way Baseline Ventures can sue Amul! (By the way, Amul once sued another milk company named Anul – with an ‘n’ – and won the case after 20 years of court battle)
Solution 2 : Use Memes Offered By Canva
Not all meme marketers leverage moment marketing or need to use celebrity figures in their memes. They just need to be funny with whatever memes available to them. In such cases, those marketers can use Canva-made images. Canva has its terms and conditions regarding copyright, but those are quite easy to follow. It has quite a lot of free meme templates that you can use safely. In fact, the first image used in this article is made on Canva!
Phew! So many legalities!
When Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme', what he meant was - Just like cells get imitated over and over, ultimately resulting in evolution - on the internet, too, cultural ideas get imitated and thus, they evolve.
So on a very basic level, imposing copyright on memes changes the definition of meme altogether. But alas! We have evolved to be civilized. We have to follow rules!
