Had a chat with a graphic designer friend about cat memes

My buddy Emily who does marketing for a pet food brand told me last week that half the cat memes she sees online are using stolen photos from Instagram accounts. She showed me three examples where people cropped out watermarks and added their own text. It kind of hit me that I've probably shared some of those without knowing. Have you guys ever checked where your meme pics actually come from?

2 comments

2 Comments

wren80616d ago

Whole internet runs on stolen stuff now, not just memes.

jake_walker15d ago

Pretty soon someone's gonna steal a meme template, edit it, post it, then someone else steals that edit, and we'll have a whole chain of stolen stuff with nobody knowing who made what first. It's like the internet equivalent of that game where you whisper something to the person next to you and by the end it's a totally different sentence. I bet half the "viral" tweets I see are just lifted from some random Reddit thread from 2019 with the words swapped around. Honestly at this point we're just all unofficially remixing each other's homework and nobody's grading it anyway.