You Wouldn’t Steal a Meme: The Threat from Article 13

It's definitely bad, I guess lobbysts have come to Europe, too.

This is entirely orthogonal to concern over privacy though, because it requires advance consent even for things which could be "fair use" or some equivalent, and the guidance is for the courts to file if they are pretty sure they see a violation.

Counterpoint: memes are probably the most common constructs of complicated copyright pedigree that people encounter in their day-to-day lives. It's analogous to the government banning ice cream.

So use the word "art" or "math" instead. Both are the free flows of ideas, data, information - that build off of one another. Art with a capital A stops being created when there is total ownership belonging to a singular entity. You can't create something from nothing. You can drive yourself crazy trying to do so, but in some variation, every new thing that is created is intrinsically connected to every existing thing, down to the tiniest, most insignificant detail. What amount of complexity between the observation, the thought process, the effort involved in creation, the final product - is required to deem something truly 'new'?

The problem with art or with ideas is that they are fundamentally dependent on the existence of everything they share similarity with, fundamentally dependent on everything they are not to exist independently - every aspect that distinguishes each unique existence from all that came previously. Art itself is successful when it can distinguish itself as something fundamentally radical, fundamentally novel - enough to provoke a dramatic paradigm shift. The world of 'high art' will tell you that this requires a tremendous amount of time to understand 'impact'.

It may be trivial and frivolous to say it is about memes, but there's a very specific, targeted effect being attempted with the usage of such a word. It's the attempt to demonstrate the irony, which is absolutely transcendent and multi layered to the point of being lost on us entirely. Memes were created as tools to be used to communicate emotion when text wasn't cutting it - for many folks. Now they share the same status as material product? Will a meme one day be framed next to a painting by Picasso?

The art world has a long history of being aware of this phenomena: from the painting, to the daguerreotype, camera lucida, the photographic negative, video and television, digital media, and many others. What is Art, what are aesthetics, what is Idea with a capital I, what makes it new, what differentiates it from a copy, what in art is owned? Art influences culture, culture influences art. They are intertwined. Memes and copyright, it's neither trivial nor frivolous, but we can at least be aware - human existence certainly has a profound sense of humor.

I'm thinking about this too. My vague understanding is that such a practice won't help. The law covers Europeans on vacation/traveling to the US. You'd basically need one of those cookie popups saying, "I solemnly swear I am not a EU citizen."

I think that's a lost battle, like "hacker".

It mentions the use of video and audio as well, image macros are just the most immediately recognizable

The concept of a "meme" itself (genetic material in media) is at best an analogy to begin with, and from what I've read, fails to take into account the existing literature on semiotics [1]:

Another criticism comes from semiotics, (e.g., Deacon,[16] Kull[17]) stating that the concept of meme is a primitivized concept of Sign. Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign without its triadic nature. In other words, meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

You can go very far down the rabbit hole of pedantry. ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics#Criticism

Words are defined by their usage. A vanishingly small number of people use the term image macro, and in my experience that has mostly been for pedantry.