Article 1: The Meme Gold Rush — Why Brands Can’t Resist stealing IP. Case Study: Aftershoot

This series is to showcase that memes are being used, most likely without permission from their copyright owners. And that if businesses have no problem using intellectual property from huge entertainment corporations, A list actors, or even the faces of people who have become famous through an internet sensation, they wouldn't have any problem using a smaller artist's IP without their permission and without compensation.

Take a scroll through Reddit, Instagram, or X and you’ll see them everywhere: a familiar movie still, a beloved character, a viral reaction image—now paired with a company logo and a call to action. 

Aftershoot is a photo culling, editing, and retouching tool — which claims you can create stunning images, grow your business, and save 39 hours every month. For a company that is involved in a creative industry, they have no problem posting ads like these.

What started as grassroots internet humor has now become a powerful advertising tool. But in the rush to feel relevant, many businesses are quietly crossing legal and ethical lines.

Memes as Marketing Shortcuts

Memes work because they arrive pre-loaded with meaning. A single image can communicate irony, nostalgia, or frustration in a fraction of a second. For advertisers, this is marketing efficiency at its peak, there is no need to build brand context or to explain emotion. In fact there is no need to hire a creative team to develop original advertising creative.

The problem? it was created by someone else, for their purposes, not for yours.

Taylor Swift is a globally influential American singer-songwriter, known for her narrative, autobiographical songs and frequent artistic reinventions, rising from country to pop superstardom, becoming one of the best-selling music artists ever, a billionaire, and holding numerous records for sales, awards (including multiple Grammys for Album of the Year), and concert tours, solidifying her as a major force in popular culture. She is indeed a powerhouse.

What Aftershoot has done here, is posted their logo on a picture of Swift in concert, and added a line of copy that tries to tie in their brand to her. What they are implying is that the photographer who took the picture of one of the most famous people in the world is using their app.

Who Owns a Meme?

Despite popular belief, memes are not automatically public domain. In most cases the underlying image is owned by a photographer, studio, or artist. The film and TV stills are owned by their prospective production companies and illustrations and screenshots remain copyrighted by their owners.

The meme format may be transformative in casual social use, but commercial use is a different legal category altogether.

"On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was." While Mean Girls came out on April 30, 2004, one seemingly throw-away line in the middle of the beloved movie has inadvertently turned into the film's new anniversary date and has since become a national holiday on social media: October 3rd.

Aftershoot has taken the meme, and with no reference to what kind of business it is, uses it because not only is it an internet sensation, it's a blockbuster hit.

Why Businesses Take the Risk

Companies often use meme IP without permission because of several factors.

• Firstly, they assume small creators won’t sue because of lack of money or know-how. 

  
  

• They are misinformed and believe memes fall under the “fair use” doctrine which allows people to use copyrighted images. 

  
  

• Their competitors are doing it and they want to maintain a competitive edge.

  
  

• They think internet culture is still the wild west, and is ownerless, so anyone can use anything.

In reality, none of these assumptions reliably hold up.

Buddy the Elf, portrayed by Will Ferrell in the 2003 film 'Elf', is a human who was raised as an elf at the North Pole and travels to New York City to find his biological father, an unenthusiastic publisher. Despite his immense size and clumsiness in the human world, Buddy's boundless Christmas spirit, love for sugary foods, and naive enthusiasm for holiday traditions make him a beloved, iconic holiday character known for quotes like "You sit on a throne of lies!".

Here, Aftershoot uses the image from the iconic film, without even a reference to a meme. It's a Christmas Ad, and we all know that it is nearly impossible to find any reference to Christmas that is not from a famous movie or have an A list actor in it.

The Power Imbalance

Even if their creative is identified, the individual artist discovering their work in a paid ad campaign faces an incredible uphill battle. Legal action is expensive, time-consuming, and very intimidating. Many unscrupulous businesses count on this imbalance to so the issue will ‘go away.’

The Home Alone Meme refers to a shocked 8 year-old Kevin McCallister after using aftershave for the first time. It's from the 1990 family home invasion film and motion picture franchise about a young boy who protects his family's property from a band of thieves. The first film remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

Aftershoot is using the image to represent shocked people who dreading the abundance of work they have to do because of holiday pictures.

What This Sets Up

This article opens the door to a deeper, more poignant  question: if memes are built on creative labor, why is that labor treated as free raw material for advertising?

The Office is an extremely popular NBC American mockumentary sitcom that chronicles the everyday lives of employees at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. The show has rocketed many of its stars to Hollywood A-List Status.

Aftershoot has taken the image featuring Steve Carrell from a Christmas episode and altered the image by adding a camera and pretending that he is a photographer.

In the next article, we’ll examine the most common myth brands rely on to justify this behavior: “fair use.”