In this week’s lectorial we discussed Copyright laws and what is fair and legal, and what is prohibited. It was interesting in that a lot of the laws of what is not allowed are new to me, and some of the prohibited actions are things I may have done had I not known. One thing that really caught my attention was when we touched on the ‘new wave’ (though it’s been prevalent for almost a decade if not more now, at least online) of memes and how copyright laws work around them.
As of now, there haven’t been any laws about memes as far as we could all tell. It’s interesting though – why are these images and videos that continually abuse copyright as they are manipulated and distributed not being cracked down on? Now don’t get me wrong, I love memes and often find myself unironically speaking in a version of English that is basically punctuated by meme talk. But it makes me wonder how I would feel and what I would do if a work of mine – either image or video – became a viral meme. Is it allowed through the use of the defence of ‘Parody and Satire’ as in fair dealing? Or is it just too difficult to enforce any form of copyright due to the viral nature of them?
I imagine that in the next few years there might be a major case from which perhaps a new law around memes will be created.
