Today’s unusual disappearance of the original “RickRoll” video file uploaded to YouTube (which has amassed over 30 million views and was forever prominently featured on Rick Astley’s YouTube channel), has led popular übergeek Chris Pirillo to declare the Internet meme of RickRolling “dead” (update: ok, it looks like he understands the word ‘meme’ a bit more than I gave him credit for).

As much as I admire Chris, I’m not so sure he loads of other people don’t understand the meaning of the word “meme“.  A meme is an idea spread from person to person, not a single item or piece of so-called intellectual property.  Physical artifacts, or, in this case, Internet content items, can be used to spread ideas, but the ideas themselves exist only in the minds of those people exposed to them.  Simply removing one digital iteration, one copy, of a content item used to proliferate an idea does not effectively kill said idea, no matter how popular the content item might have been.  (Besides, the RickRoll video itself is so widespread that boundless digital copies and variations exist in numerous forms.)  Rickrolling is an idea, not intellectual property, and it therefore can never be subject to copyright, and it can never “die”.

I guess what really bothers me is that many people on the Web (excuse me, many butt-hurt copyright owners) seem to believe that particular content items, meaning a post, an image, a video, a song, etc., are themselves Internet memes.  This is so far from the actual definition of the term “meme” as studied by those who research actual memetics.  A meme is a cultural symbol, idea, or practice that can only be transmitted from one mind to another, like data flowing through a network.  The architecture of the Internet is, obviously, the perfect network in which to rapidly postulate memes (ideas) from one user to the next.  Therefore, we have to remember that the latest funny picture of some cat (specifically, the bits, the ones and zeroes of the picture itself) spreading virally across the Web, being endlessly copied and re-copied digitally, is not itself the meme!  The meme is the comic nature and meaning derived from funny pictures of cats – and laughing at and sharing something previously unseen – it’s an idea, not some digital artifact one can clearly define.

Intellectual property lawyers need to figure this out.  You can copyright “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, and enforce that copyright as it pertains to digital copies of the song or music video, but you can never copyright the idea of tricking someone in to watching it, which is what a RickRoll literally is.  The RickRoll idea is ubiquitous, and, although like a popular fashion trend or a one-hit wonder on the radio a meme may wane or generally leave the public consciousness, because it’s an idea, it can never die.  Until every human being who has ever experienced a RickRoll has died, and the concept has been obliterated from the history books by future surprise-hating Neo-fascist revisionists, the meme, the idea itself, cannot die.

Moreover, the methods with which the content items behind an Internet meme are spread (social sharing, emailing, posting to some blog, copying and uploading to a new space, etc.) are so ubiquitous, it’s not in the best interest of copyright holders to attempt to control these content items.  If anything, the “Barbara Streisand Effect” (aka, the backlash at attempts to censor something online) will kick in, and negative publicity will further fuel the content items spread.  Plus, that spread itself, the very idea of spreading something because of backlash, can become a meme on its own.  Then things start to go meta, someone divides by zero, and the entire world implodes.  In other words, you don’t fight the Internet, because the Internet always wins.

Finally, I’m not saying copyright infringement is good, or that the sometimes hateful, vengeful practices of the Internet are wise, but people need to remember that the Web is a utilitarian state, and incredibly technologically deterministic.  It does whatever it pleases, and there isn’t much one can do to stop a bloodthirsty crowd.  With that in mind, the RickRoll isn’t dead, and today’s maneuver by YouTube will only make it stronger.

———————-

Update: YouTube has restored the video, claiming its disappearance was a mistake.

Email

Print

Share

Reblog

Tweet