Culture

Why Is It So Hard To Penalise People Who Make Money By Stealing Jokes On The Internet?

Plagiarism is plagiarism, whether it's an essay or a dumb meme about dogs.

by Garry Westmore  8 December 2015

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Last week, comedian and Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien was served a $600,000 lawsuit for allegedly stealing jokes for his opening monologue from comedic writer and Twitter user Alex Kaseberg. The lawsuit is a first of sorts, as no one’s ever been sued for stealing jokes from a social media outlet or blog for use on commercial television.

It comes off the back of more concerted efforts by Twitter to crack down on copyright holders’ rights being infringed on, allowing users to file DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints against people who have pilfered jokes that someone else has already posted.

It’s high time Twitter took proactive steps against the plagiarism of content, because while passing off someone’s else’s joke as your own might seem harmless, social media is often a great means for writers and comedians to build their profile and share their humour with the world. If LA-based comic Olga Lexell hadn’t made a formal complaint earlier this year for the unauthorised use of her tweet by numerous content aggregation sites, the door may never have opened.

Lexell’s action resulted in Twitter pulling down unattributed copycat tweets on copyright grounds, and she’s not alone; Twitter accounts like Plagiarism is Bad, which outs and shames tweet thieves, are blazing a trail for those who seek recourse against plagiarism on Twitter.

–

So Who Is Profiting?

Twitter isn’t the only social media forum where people are taking others’ jokes and benefitting from them. Josh Otrovesky, a U.S ‘comedian’ who uses the handle @thefatjewish, has amassed seven million Instagram followers largely through posting memes and other visual gags made by others that often appear without any name or handle attributing the image to its original author.

It’s a similar tactic taken by Elliot Tebele, aka @FuckJerry, who seems to see collating this stuff as hard work; he told Business Insider last year that he’s “doing it all day”. In the same interview, he presented himself as some sort of cultural clairvoyant, stating: “In terms of knowing if the audience is going to like a post – it’s hard to explain, I have this gut feeling.”

The man clearly has a gift.

All this wouldn’t be so bad if people like Otroversky and Tebele weren’t profiting from it. Otroversky is said to be earning upwards of US$6,000 (but averaging $2,500) per sponsored post, has a book deal, and earlier in 2015 signed with one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies, CAA. He’s appeared in advertisements for online food ordering services, is a regular on Bloomberg News, and has a plus-size modelling contract.

Tebele, who also gets paid for sponsored posts, has established his own clothing label since finding internet fame and is making enough money from sponsored posts that Instagram is a full-time job.

–

Taking Advantage Of Good Internet Folk And Their Naivety

Holding copyright on a meme or a joke is undoubtedly difficult. Being the age of the internet, many of us assume that such material is simply out there in the public domain, with much of it attributable to no one, such is the material’s universality. But that universality is often a result of something being shared so often that the original author’s credit is lost along the digital grapevine.

A great example of this is a meme thought up and published by Elite Daily, which ended up very quickly on the accounts of @betches (three million followers) and @newyorkcitylady (35,000 followers), with the watermarked Elite Daily logo being replaced along the way. Melbourne writer/comedian and frequent Tweeter Deirdre Fidge has also had the dubious honour of having her material appear without credits on Otroversky’s Instagram account.

  A photo posted by thefatjewish (@thefatjewish) on

“I understand people often re-blog or re-gram,” says Fidge. “A lot of them are just people who enjoy silly jokes and don’t see it as ‘theft’ at all. What does bother me, though, is that people like The Fat Jew are making money off of other people’s jokes, especially so consistently and unashamedly.”

It’s this “once it’s on the Internet it’s anyone’s” mentality that both Otroversky and Tebele use to justify their theft, claiming that it’s too difficult to find the original source of the content they pilfer. It’s a claim refuted by other comedians and internet wunderkinds, some of whom have posted extensive lists of the original jokes alongside their stolen (and cropped) counterparts as they appeared on Otroversky and Tebele’s accounts.

When they’ve been called out for pilfering jokes, excuses have usually been trite or dismissive. Otroversky’s response to Patrick Walsh, who called him out for stealing comedian Davon Magwood’s joke (sans Magwood’s name, or handle) following the Cecil the Lion outrage, falls in the latter category:

A photo posted by thefatjewish (@thefatjewish) on

Otroversky’s response?

Magwood himself posted an on-point open letter to Otroverksy and Tebele, drawing attention to the fact they “make money from the traffic you generate and guess what, I’d also would like to be paid and credited for the traffic that I’ve generated. I shouldn’t have to asked to be credited for my work, neither should other comedians or clever social media people.”

When Fidge tried to call out her plagiarist by reposting her original joke, instead of an apology or credit she received backlash from Otroversky’s followers. “A few of his fans commented abusive messages calling me egotistical and aggressive, so I deleted it. I dislike confrontation, especially from scary American teenage girls,” she told Junkee.

It’s contemptible that this happens so frequently, openly, and without repercussions, particularly when Instagram’s Terms of Use state that users must “comply with all laws, rules and regulations … including but not limited to, copyright laws.”

Copyright is designed to protect original expression such as words or images, but sparsely worded jokes, mash-ups of words and pre-existing images fall in a grey area, or a largely untried area for intellectual property law at least. But it’s this grey area that The Fat Jew, Fuck Jerry and others exploit, and while Instagram makes it somewhat harder to acknowledge original authors due to a lack of inbuilt regram or hyperlink options, that’s a very convenient excuse. It’s not that it’s harder for these so-called curators to acknowledge the source of these memes; it’s simply easier not to get caught– and if they do, they can blame the internet at large.

At the end of the day it’s the comedians and writers who are trying to make a name for themselves — and rely on social media to help them do it — who lose out; non-beneficiaries from their own humour.

Magwood was right when he said comedians and savvy social media operators shouldn’t have the onus put on them to make others do the right thing; that it’s up to those opportunistic and greedy enough to plagiarise to change. If they don’t, then Instagram and Twitter should be more active in protecting those who do operate within the terms of use.

–

Both Otroversky and Tebele were approached for comment. Neither had responded by the time this article was published.

–

Garry Westmore is a Melbourne-based educator, freelancer and former film and arts editor of Spook. You can find him on Twitter @GarryWestmore