Copyright Law & Internet Memes

Introduction

The word "meme", coined by the English evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, in his pathbreaking book "The Selfish Gene', was derived from the Greek word "mimema" meaning 'imitation' in the year 1976. Drawing a parallel between memes and biological genes, Dawkins was of the view that like genes that resonate with evolution of living beings, memes indicate and contribute towards the evolution of cultures. Generally speaking, memes are bite-sized funny (or at least they aim to be), culturally relevant and emotion provoking pieces of information, shared over and over again, sometimes to the point where the meme itself transcends the popularity of the underlying work contained therein. Most social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram are interspersed with memes created on the basis of stills/videos/images of movie scenes, sitcoms, images of people, animals, amusing natural phenomena, etc. (Third Party IP). More often than not, these underlying