A father in the US has only just discovered that his (now ten-year-old) baby is an internet meme in Japan.
According to Gawker, the meme started when 2chan.net uploaded the baby's picture with interactive text bubbles:
From there, Japanese fans got creative and images of the "Japanese Gay Porn Baby" (natch) appeared "pasted onto Kurt Cobain's head, carved into Mount Rushmore and tattooed onto David Beckham's torso. He was an eight-bit video game character. He became a three-dimensional sculpture ... [and even] showed up on wacky television game shows ... [or] blotted out images of genitalia in pornography".
Yeah, this could be regarded as a breach of copyright in the photos. And yeah, in many jurisdictions this would be an invasion of privacy (however defined). But really, the baby's dad hit it on the head when he said he wasn't bothered by it because "the meme really had nothing to do with Stephen qua Stephen - the photo was being treated as a kind of open-source stock image."
Amen.
Of course, there are examples of very personalised meme "attacks" which may warrant a more hard-core stance. Epic Boobs Girl comes to mind.
EBG posted pictures of herself on Bebo in December 2006 with the tag "Epic Boobs". A photo went viral and Loaded magazine eventually republished it (along with her name) under the headline “Wanted! The epic boobs girl!” Readers were offered a reward of £500 for assistance in encouraging her to pose for the magazine.
(In fact, it says a lot about just how viral the image went, when I can't find the original in a sea of thousands of hits, but here's one example of how it was used:
)The Press Complaints Commission rejected her privacy complaint, saying that the pictures had been given such a wide circulation that it was no longer credible to describe them as private.
Had Loaded taken them from the Bebo site without them having appeared widely on other sites, the commission might well have reached a different decision.
EBG, perhaps privacy was the wrong cause of action - if your likeness become a meme, there isn’t much you can do about it. I'd be looking instead about the use of your image in a commercial capacity. Or, perhaps - since Loaded was paying people to convince you to pose for them, an action in harassment or nuisance.
Links:
Gawker "When your Infant is Secretly Famous in Japan": http://gawker.com/5640008/when-your-infant-is-secretly-famous-in-japan
Guardian "Epic Boobs Girl": http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/may/11/pcc-privacy
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