"The point that I’m trying to make is if you’re going to spent months of your time and thousands of your dollars drafting a concept, hiring a team, and building a free and completely open source video game as a hobby, you better use zombies as your theme."
That is not the right thing to have learned from this. I suggest this one:
If you're going to take a bunch of ideas and content wholesale from a community for your new thing, it might be good if you engage with that community and make something that respects the context of the stuff you're taking, instead of making something they'll perceive as cheap and foreign.
Which community would that be? 4chan? Reddit? The rest of the internet that also regurgitates memes?
You cannot 'engage with' the internet as a whole. No community owns a meme: it's the fact that so many people reproduce them that makes it a meme. The problem here is that some folks do feel they, or their community, own a meme. These people are the problem, not this guy with a place for a game. Or at least, he's another kind of problem.
The engaging with the community isn't so that you can make a petition that says, "Are you cool with my game [Y/N]" and have everyone on the Internet sign it. It's so that you can create something which demonstrates an awareness of the culture and doesn't come off as derivative and shallow to the people who deal in it daily and care to defend it.
If he had made a post on Reddit or talked to anyone on 4chan and said "I want to make a meme-themed iOS game, help me make it not suck" and listened, he probably would have wound up making something that did not entice people to mock him and insult him. That's what I mean about engaging.
You want to exploit something you consider "garbage" but which has a certain value to the people that create and/or perpetuate it, and you find it odd that it would piss those people off?
This has nothing to do with "the internet" or Reddit, or 4chan or whatever. You try to do this with some local group of people that's involved in whatever kind of hobby or activity you consider weird, or "garbage", and you'll get more or less the same response.
Plus the other aspect is that he is taking stuff that other people built for their own enjoyment and trying to exploit it in a commercial context.
If he had tried pulling together an open source development team nobody would have been seriously offended.
But what this guy is doing is the same as taking art done by anonymous street artists and selling merchandise based on it. If people pay before or after the production doesn't matter in that case. Acting totally surprised when "the street" is fighting back seems slightly naive.
Can you point out specific examples of this 'art done by anonymous street artists' that he is 'selling'? I don't think you can. Neither the "Le" meme, the concept of "rage comics" nor the texts that have made "Good Guy Greg" into a 'good guy' have been made by a particular person in any of these communities.
You don't actually know what his towers were going to defend and it seems he was hiring artists to render instances of these memes to be defended. That there are individuals who are offended has nothing to do with 'their' content being ripped off. In fact, I doubt any of these people that send 'hatemail' ever were part of the initial creation of a meme. I doubt they ever put any effort into creating a reproduction of a meme, more than surfing to a website and entering a text that was automatically placed over an image. These people are just assholes and you shouldn't defend them.
No, but that's an understandable cultural misconception. The money is relevant, but not the main issue at hand.
In these communities, nobody cares about money, because your standing in the community isn't determined by how much money you have, but by how much you have contributed. This is kind of implicit in 4chan users, where it's considered tacky to even claim explicit ownership, because memes are understood to be products of an amorphous community. It's explicit on places like Reddit, where cultural standing is measured as a number.
Yes, the author would not be receiving money for this product, but having created the game as himself (as opposed to as, say, a semi-anonymous Newgrounds member) he draws more ire. Contrast the relevant videos: the original Kickstarter video features a single strong personality, a person mediating the experience of the memes in the game, while the response video is relatively anonymous, attempting to minimize the mediation between the viewer and his point. The fact that the response video also calls out other YouTube celebrities who do the same thing—i.e. offer mediation and commentary of other content through an explicit personality—should be incredibly telling.
Other comments that say things like, "I'd be honored to have my content featured in someone's game," are missing the point. It's a basic culture clash: the article's author expresses distinct authorship which can be traced to a concrete person (or persona), even if he gets no profit and open-sources the result, while the people who make up the response understand that authorship as contrary to the whole point of communal humor, i.e. memes. The other meme aggregation sites are also 'mediators' of a sort, preventing people from experiencing the direct product of the community.
I feel your pain. I had something similar happen to me -- though not to the same degree. Recently I was selling posters based on a meme unique to my campus -- the designs were our own (so we had the copyright), but the original concept the memes were based on was not. (Imagine you sold a photo of your own cat with the text "I can haz cheezburger" -- it's still your copyright, right?)
Anyway, some guy started posting that we were fraudsters, were raping culture, etc. It's funny, our troll sounded just like yours -- obviously intelligent and articulate, but took something trivial (internet memes) way too seriously. I really can't understand the mindset of these people -- when I noticed that reddit was becoming a waste of time, I didn't post a long rant about it -- I just stopped going to reddit.
If it's any comfort, know that such people likely have little else going on in their life, and trolling in defence of their online "tribe" is all they have. If you're actually creating stuff, being entrepreneurial, putting yourself out there, you're already beating them.
1. On the internet large amounts of traffic means that you will have trolls galore. In my eyes some of those comments are normal internet fodder and just need to be moderated out.
2. You are using IP that you do not own. Memes are not public domain. Of course that is going to get people angry, particularly when there is money involved.
You conflate attribution with pirating? What specifically about IP rights are you referring to? Also, the aforementioned communities you are talking about are tens of millions of people.
Nice word - conflate. I had to look that up. I never said anything about piracy - you said that, not me.
If you're going to copy photos and paste funny text on them without considering whether you have legal rights to use the photo, then who am I to stop you? I like memes. But then if are going to cry "IP rights" when somebody else takes the same photo plus your funny text and uses it in some other way - then in my book you get filed under H for Hypocrite.
I think what that is, people showing their true colors about respect for other's work. If it's convenient to use something then it's fair-use and the IP owner can go screw himself. But if somebody takes OUR stuff, then bring the vengeance of the Internet upon thee with furious anger!
You're right. I don't see footers on each Fry meme attributing the character to Matt Groening. And yet, when you add 24-point Impact font saying something witty, you own it all of a sudden? Give me a break.
If it's fair use to put the text on the image in the first place, then it's fair use to use the image with the text. People can be upset all they want about it, but it's not going to change the fact that the entire spread of memes occurs without respect for (and in fact despite) copyright law.
What does it mean that "memes are not public domain?" Of course that's the case if the image used in the meme is copyrighted, but does it go beyond that? Can the "pattern" or "recipe" for a meme be copyrighted? For example, would copyright protect the very idea of placing text describing an awkward social encounter on an image of a penguin?
Ideally that could be classified as a derivative work, which one could argue is fair use. But, that argument will happen in a court after you have been sued. The "Kind of Bloop" affair should give you an example of what I'm talking about:
http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/
Honestly though this is just couch-analytics from me. I'm not sure how copyright applies to meme pictures and am fascinated by related court cases. Anyone else have interesting meme/copyright-related court case suggestions?
Fair use is a fickle beast and not something to rely on. I have no idea how those sites exist without lawsuits but I would not consider them shining examples of web success.
My advice is to contact "memegenerator, knowyourmeme, and others" and ask them what licensing agreements they have with the copyright holders that allow them publish the content. You may be surprised to learn how much or how little money changes hand.
I spoke with the founder/owner of campusmemes.com asking the same questions. He basically said, "We operate business as usual until we get a C&D. Remove the image. Life goes on."
Hmm, The Monetization of Copyrighted Content without any Licenses sounds more like a service than a software product. Maybe try to obtain license agreements from the copyright holders and put the funding for agree'ed to licenses in the Kickstarter campaign.
This guy asked for money for a project using 4chan memes and got abused for it. Not very surprising, they are a vindictive bunch and hate the popularization of their culture. Their wrath is even greater if it even appears that money is somehow involved.
A couple of years ago Hot Topic made a shirt using the "Rage Guy" face from 4chan. They responded by rebranding the "Rage Guy" as "Race Guy" making tons of racist comics featuring the image and then complaining to Hot Topic for supporting racism.[1]
What happens on kickstarter when you pledge a project, they get tons of money, and then they don't deliver? For example, what if this guy gets enough to begin but he sucks at coding and isn't able to deliver anything like what he promised? Or what if someone were to just pocket the kickstarter money and disappear?
Donating to Kickstarter gives you no guarantees whatsoever. The guy can basically just walk away with the money if he so decides. No, really.
This however makes it all the more a powerful concept in my mind, since the "makers" have to figure out how to communicate they are trustworthy AND have this great idea.
Absolutely. I have this theory that part of the reason that meme culture is often so absurd, obscure and frequently offensive exactly to prevent its co-option and commercialization.
Case and point: Two years ago Hot Topic started selling "rage guy" t-shirts. The internet decided it would be having none of that and coerced the meme "rage guy" into "race guy" by pumping out tonnes of racist comics. Hot Topic were forced to withdraw its t-shirt range.
The thing to remember is that behind every meme is a person. Someone spent time and effort to make a funny image or story, and they probably never got paid for it. Then someone comes along and tries to make money off of it: how would you feel?
And who actually makes money from meme's anyway? Is YouTube scum for making money from showing video memes? Likewise for 4chan (the website, not the community) and Reddit? The advertisers that buy ads on those pages? What about memegenerators?
The obvious answer is that the content being discussed isn't really a meme. They are copyrighted images. The idea of a "Troll Face" can be a meme, surely, but the specific image of a trollface that is widely recognized was obviously copyrighted. If you don't like that then create your own image and release it with a more permissive license like Public Domain.
Every site mentioned helps to create new memes and supports the "infrastructure" of motivating other to come up with new memes.
The meme defense projects seems to try capitalizing from just popular memes by making them even more popular. YouTube,4chan,Reddit are like a complex network of indie music clubs. Meme Defender is acting like a major label, that just takes well known "scene" memes and exploiting them towards a non-meme audience. No wonder the "true fans" are screaming sell-out.
What about 'all the things'? It's a frame pulled from a hyperbole and a half comic strip. Are you saying nobody owns that image, just because it's become popular?
That's what his blog says, but if you read the Kickstarter project page, it makes no mention of open source. It says that if you donate $2, you get a free copy of the full version. It also says that some of the Kickstarter money will go towards marketing.
None of this sounds like he planned to make it free or open source at all. It sounds like he is trying to capitalize on intellectual property that he doesn't own the rights to.
I love it when I spend time writing open source software that people use for free. If a business uses it and earns money because of it, I'm even more delighted.
If you choose to put something creative out into the ether, you should have the expectation that if it's good there are going to be copies and other derivations. If you can't stomach this or can't afford legal counsel to enforce your IP, keep your creative works off the Internet.
The world is a better place because of "unsolicited collaboration".
I'd feel honored someone actually thought my output was good enough to try and make money off of, and good luck to them. Maybe I'll start competing since I could probably do a lot better. (Edit: in case my more general point is lost here, that general point is that we shouldn't be basing our policies on feelings.)
Please don't let the haters hold you back. The entire creative world is awash with re-mixes. This is nothing to be ashamed of or to avoid. Contrary to what some seem to believe, NOTHING is created in a vacuum. Everyone is influenced by others. The extent to which you show your influences in your work is really just part of your creative process in my opinion.
I hope you find a way to make your game regardless of all the "original" people that think they are better somehow than those who are re-mixing to create something new with the culture they love.
I thought the video was funny, and when I read your post I just assumed that it would turn out that the art studio that you were going to hire turned out to have made the video as advertising for your game.
To me it looks like awesome advertising, and it turns out that you got it for free, so why not just be happy? Ignore the trolls and see it from the bright side. =)
People draw some crappy pictures or take a crappy photo and slap an average joke over the top spread it around the internet and then get annoyed that someone puts it in a game?
Why aren't they going after the people who endlessly re-post these things?
I got death threats when I followed the open source license, but tried to make money on my own app. It utilized an app under the GNU license.
The problem with open source (especially anything involving the GNU) is that although you can make money, the majority (not all) will make it very difficult for you to do this.
Right, all those communities are garbage because they were mean to you. But you're still gonna make your little game from the images and ideas those communities traffic in. So, what does that make your game?
That is not the right thing to have learned from this. I suggest this one:
If you're going to take a bunch of ideas and content wholesale from a community for your new thing, it might be good if you engage with that community and make something that respects the context of the stuff you're taking, instead of making something they'll perceive as cheap and foreign.