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”.
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