You Love Pizza Rat. You Don’t Own Pizza Rat

Managing copyright content

[tangor]

In other words, #PizzaRat went viral because there’s something universally recognizable in #PizzaRat. But that poses the interesting question: Just because we relate to #PizzaRat, just because we’ve embraced and most importantly shared #PizzaRat, does #PizzaRat belong to all of us? And no, not in the philosophical sense. Who, legally, does #PizzaRat belong to?

In the minds of many, the Internet was originally conceived to be a decentralized medium, chaotic but wonderful, a place where things spread organically and freely and without mediation. Instead, as John Herrman has argued in The Awl, it’s turned into a medium that’s mediated at every possible point. It was the same with #PizzaRat. At approximately 3:30 PM on September 22, #PizzaRat came to the attention of Jukin Media, an LA-based viral video outfit. The company swiftly acquired the rights to the video, when it had only 2,660 views.

[wired.com...]
While some will see this as overreach, others will cheer when their content is licensed by a company like this. In all regards, everything created is copyright and one should always keep that in mind.

[graeme_p]

Two comments:

1) the justification of copyright is to provide an incentive to create works. In this case it has turned into a way of impeding the distribution of works that would have been created anyway.
2) the wired article links to an interesting article that argues that all this is going to kill websites [theawl.com ] as we know them.

[tangor]

Copyright is suffering a death of a thousand (millions) of cuts, but (USA) Fair Use and Parody have saved some from lawsuits. What makes this one interesting is that a third party jumped in to ENFORCE a copyright. Reminds me of those Patent Trolls who have plagued the web and the infrastructure (hardware, os, devices, etc) in recent years.