Over the weekend, a photograph taken by Jesco Denzel went mega-viral. Ultra-viral? Really really viral? Whatever. It killed. You must have seen it. It depicts leaders of the G7 nations, headed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a composition that seems to suggest the adults of the world are schooling a petulant-looking Donald Trump. But I don’t mention the photograph to comment on the President or about his administration’s posture regarding international trade. I mention it because by now, the image has been “memed” dozens or hundreds of times; and although any number of these derivative images may be amusing, I have to question the extent to which they are particularly important.
Consider what I assume to be a favorite version among Trump critics: the one that shows the President seated in a high chair with a bowl of spaghetti overturned on his head. It’s funny. But what it actually says is also redundant to the way I think many people read the original Denzel photograph in the first place. What has the meme really added? A fleeting moment of comic relief soon to be forgotten amid the millions more to come? Or is it truly a substantive work of political satire that will have lasting, salient effect?
In context to this post, the meme version is not necessarily a fair use as a parody, if it were ever to be the subject of a copyright infringement claim. Without doing a whole fair use analysis, the fact that the spaghetti version merely emphasizes what the original says (at least to Trump’s critics) weighs against a finding of fair use in which the meme-maker parodied the work rather than merely used Denzel’s photograph to lampoon the President. But within that analysis lies a hint about the social and cultural value of memes in general.
Because the meme in this example adds almost nothing while potentially diluting the value of the original—both for the author and the viewer—we should not completely ignore what we lose in the digital age, when an important image is no longer allowed to simply be what it is for even a few hours before every prankster with Photoshop has to draw metaphorical mustaches on it. Though funny, the spaghetti variation of Denzel’s photograph is glib in contrast to the provocative quality of the original, which my friend, the photographer Doug Menuez, predicts may prove to be one of the truly important photographs in history.*
If it seems that I exaggerate the worthlessness of memes it is only to propose some counterbalance to the more general attitude that the social media meme is a medium of great value. And the reason I stress a more balanced view is that several stories have surfaced recently declaring that if the current EU plan to harmonize copyright law for the digital age passes as written, memes will be banned from the internet. So, aside from the fact that, of course, memes will not be banned, I’m not convinced society would lose anything if memes were either fewer in number or less-infringing in nature.
Specifically, this “save the meme” campaign is one of several lines of attack on the proposals in Article 13 of the European Commission’s strategy to create a Digital Single Market. This section outlines a mandate for platforms that host user-generated content to implement technological filters that identify and help remove infringing material from their platforms. Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda has labeled these technical measures “censorship machines” (of course she has), and this rhetoric has been echoed by the usual suspects EFF, Techdirt, et al as the latest major threat to the “internet as we know it.”
On that subject, I’d like to remind readers that the “Russian hacking” of American democracy via Facebook ads was a campaign based largely on memes. If you watched the hearings on Capitol Hill, memes are what Members of Congress presented to Zuckerberg as evidence of Russian-sponsored messages designed to foment and aggravate divisiveness among American citizens. So, not only would I caution against too ardently “saving the meme,” it seems increasingly clear that the more generalized agenda to save “the internet as we know it” cannot be taken too literally.
In a subsequent post, I’ll try to dig into Article 13 in more detail, but the general complaint being marketed as inevitable meme extinction assumes that any technical measure employed to filter the uploading of unlicensed content will not be able to detect fair uses. Consequently speech—potentially speech of great parodic significance—will be removed from the internet.
It’s a ballsy complaint coming from the same crowd that insists rightsholders must “consider fair use” before sending a DMCA takedown because they seem to think the user of a work should not have to “consider fair use” before uploading. I say this because these same critics assume, or at least promote the idea, that most meme uses of protected images are fair uses. In all likelihood, however, this is not the case. Most memes I see would not stand up to fair use analysis, so what the critics are really saying is that memes are just too important to lose, even if they’re infringing.
So, I would first reiterate that a very large volume of memes are less culturally valuable to society than they are financially valuable to the platforms. Second, these critics overstate the assumption that everyone who alters a photo to make a meme is engaged in a fair use—be it funny, poignant, cruel, or just Russian agents having fun. Third, and perhaps most importantly, if the so-called “censorship machines” were as hyperactive as the critics claim, these measures would invariably harm the interests of rights holders, advertisers, and any other party who benefits from licensed use of works on social platforms.
This suggests that perhaps nobody envisions “censorship machines.” In fact, if experience tells us anything in this regard, it’s that the anti-copyright, pro-Google “activists” start saying “censorship” and “break the internet” at the mere suggestion that any proposal should change the status quo. Hence the specifics are either still in development or are being purposely obfuscated by the critics.
As I say, I’ll do my best to get into the specifics related to Article 13, but in the meantime, I’ll summarize what I said to Washington Post tech reporter Caitlin Dewey when she predicted the death of memes in 2012: infringing protected works is not actually necessary to produce memes; authors of works produce all the time without infringing; it’s called being creative.
*I do not claim to know how Mr. Denzel feels about any of the memes of his photograph.
