Texting in today’s digital age is sometimes even more popular than calling. In addition to regular texting, texters often use emoticons (emoji) or stickers when texting with others, relatives, or friends. Sometimes words and stickers cannot fully express the feelings that the sender wants to convey, then “memes” are born. Memes can be created by users from their photos or using images from the internet or other people’s photos, so is using photos from other sources to make memes considered copyright infringement? Please read VCD’s following article for more detailed information.
1. Meme – A new term for young individuals
“Meme” is a broad term, including many images, videos, texts, or online content, which is often humorous and light-hearted, so it is often shared a lot on social networking sites. Memes are jokes based on irony, satire, or parody and often use different images or videos (such as GIFs) from various media available on the internet.
Regardless of their status, these memes are still shown in lovely, cute images and are not offensive images. Because of the cute images, these memes both express the sender’s emotions and show a unique sense of fun in the conversation.
The majority of memes on the Internet are spread by teenagers and young adults. This is because these two age groups like to convey messages, and also enjoy the mischief of memes. However, the average age of those participating in spreading memes has also increased, especially as users in their 40s discovered the humor of sending popular memes to their friends.
2. Intellectual property rights and memes
Meme culture is still out of coverage in the field of intellectual property rights protection in Vietnam. However, as with all other types of works, copyright automatically arises upon the creation of a newly created meme when the meme content is an original work of authorship, with a minimal degree of creativity. and is fixed in tangible expression. Copyright law gives the original creators of the meme or the owners of the media channels using the meme the exclusive rights to copy, modify, distribute, post, and use the meme. Therefore, making a meme from someone else’s photo can sometimes constitute a copyright violation in Article 28 of the IP law on infringement of the author’s moral rights “Protecting the integrity of the work from revealing it to others distorted; do not allow others to modify or mutilate the work in any form that harms the author’s honor and reputation” when there is an act of modifying the original work, then using, sharing, or copying it. Copy to repost multiple times.
In addition, businesses today often use memes as a marketing tool to attract customers’ attention and catch the trend of young people. When a meme is used for commercial purposes, the legal owner of the meme can obtain trademark rights.
3. Is making meme images considered copyright infringement?
In general, making and sharing memes online is considered safe and unlikely to be used. However, when memes are used for commercial purposes (such as printing memes on clothes and selling them) without the permission or license of the rightful owner, such activity will be considered illegal in copyright infringement. Regulations in Article 28 of the Intellectual Property Law on infringement of property rights are specified in Article 20 of the Intellectual Property Law.
“Distributing, importing for distribution to the public through sale or another form of transfer of ownership of originals or copies of works in tangible form”.
All in all, if you are making and sharing memes on social media or other platforms on the Internet, IP infringement is not a concern. However, any attempt to monetize a meme owned by someone else could result in legal action by the copyright or trademark owner. Therefore, the first thing to consider is the verification of ownership and intellectual property rights, such as licensing agreements when choosing non-original content for commercial use, advertising, or making derivative works.
Above is the article “Is making meme images considered copyright infringement?”. We hope this article is useful to you.
