Does anyone @here know how businesses are able to post and use memes on Instagram without worrying about plagiarism/copyright infringement?

The short answer: Memes exist in a weird gray area. When it doubt, consult your legal team. The long answer: Memes based on copyrighted material are technically infringing on copyright regardless of who is posting/using them. Like, in your example, Morning Brew is committing copyright infringement. How do they get away with it? Why aren't copyright holders going after them? It's difficult to know for certain. As far as I know, there haven't been any law suits targeting memes that use copyrighted material. However, there have been suits targeting major companies/brands from using original copyrighted memes — aka the stuff that derived from popular media.

My wife works in copyright and image compliance. @fast-electrician-95402 is right in that memes exist in a gray area. While not technically fair use, it is generally agreed that if it went to a judge they may see it as such so no one has taken the risk of pursuing it yet. If you're sharing memes that other people have made, you're more likely to get away with it even though even sharing a meme with infringed copyrighted material is infringement. If you are creating the meme and using copyrighted material to do so you are infringing and could get caught. She has settled cases against infringers who have created a meme. In that instance, the person stole an image from a photographer and added text overlay. Also, there's the case of Shepard Fairey vs AP. Not only was he guilty but he was the only person to get criminally charged. If something is already in the public zeitgeist, like that Patrick meme, it's fine. But don't take a photo from somewhere, add text, and claim it's a meme. It'll backfire.

That makes sense, I could see how that would be copyright infringement even if companies don't normally enforce it. Lots of memes are created anonymously, though, so the company might not be able to pursue the creator if it doesn't know who made the meme.

Why do I find this fascinating 🤔

@purple-monitor-35762 if you want to go further down the rabbit hole, there's a growing trend of brands giving communities artistic license with their IP (slide 34-35) and an emerging trend of headless brands (slide 37-39) that allow the community to interpret however they want. All of this being fueled by the prevalence of meme/remix culture — which if you want to learn more about, check out the .

Very cool I really agree - "everything is a remix" 😆 and will check these out!

The original version of Everything Is A Remix is worth checking out, too. But the latest one digs better into memes.

I was just doing some research on this last week! I did come across an interesting take saying that since they’re not directly impeding on the original copyrighted works method of distribution (I’m probably butchering this explanation) that most don’t mind them being shared. So for example, the office isn’t going to lose viewers just because someone is sharing an office meme (if you think about it, they might gain MORE viewers because of it). So they’re not losing any money from them being distributed. However, if an actor in the Office didn’t want their likeness to be used, they could take action against someone using it. So like everyone else said, it’s a super grey area. I read that to be safe, companies should reshare memes so if someone asked them about it, they could point fingers back to the original person or company they shared it from.