Update 2:30pm PST: cafepress store lolcatz is closed.
We’ve been informed that someone on cafepress is selling the images you love without consulting or securing intellectual rights to produce these images. Tell your friends this place is stealing images and consider your purchase decisions. I have contacted their Intellectual Property people so the site won’t be alive for much longer.
** If you know the owner of a lolcat/dog/walrus/hamster/mouse or the person who captioned an image that you’ve seen here have them contact us at copyright @ icanhascheezburger.com to properly attribute their images **
We do not agree with this practice. The humor and enjoyment found here on ICHC should be shared with their creators. Not stolen. Those of you who have purchased these products shouldn’t purchase these products any more. As he does not have a right to distribute. Cease and desist order sent to cafepress.com @ 12:43 pm PST.
The images we post here also come to question and we are ever vigilent about updating and sourcing our images.
It may sound humorouss, but we here at ICHC take copyright and trademark violation seriously. We are working to organize fair compensation for all of the stuff you see, be it even a simple link back to their site. We credit as much of if not all of the services we use here (clustrmaps, statcounter), our plugins (wordpress plugins), the website software we use (wordpress). And the host we were born on (dreamhost, moving to theplanet).
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I’ve thought about making “i has a flavor” panties on Cafepress for myself, but I would never sell them. That’s just wrong.
kdub – hottt!
Thanks for posting this.
Just wondering, but have you taken into consideration the intellectual property of the HappyCat cathead, that you use in your banner and in many of your images/captions? Yeah, it started on Something Awful, but it was originally thought of/found by a user of those forums, who has in fact said ” i wish to hell people would stop using my cathead for stuff hes probably tired by now, jesus”
Just something for you guys to think about.
Hate to break it to you son, but just because you post the images here does not mean you are the owner. Moreso, just adding text to an image found online does NOT make you the owner of that intellectual property. If anything, the person who took the picture owns the rights to it–no you, not your mommy, not the person who added the text.
EXACTLY! I always feel a little bad when I get those emails full of pics, b/c I know the photographers will never see credit.
[quote comment="2887"]Just wondering, but have you taken into consideration the intellectual property of the HappyCat cathead, that you use in your banner and in many of your images/captions? Yeah, it started on Something Awful, but it was originally thought of/found by a user of those forums, who has in fact said ” i wish to hell people would stop using my cathead for stuff hes probably tired by now, jesus”
Just something for you guys to think about.[/quote]
We’re trying to fix things we can. Can you link me to this information you speak of dot man?
[quote comment="2889"]Hate to break it to you son, but just because you post the images here does not mean you are the owner. Moreso, just adding text to an image found online does NOT make you the owner of that intellectual property. If anything, the person who took the picture owns the rights to it–no you, not your mommy, not the person who added the text.[/quote]
FWIW we state that we don’t own many if any of the images. We share, organize, and tag them. it’s fair use from what I understand, IANAL, and IANACL. We try to source and credit all the pictures. It’s nearly impossible without help.
So that’s why we’re trying to get a hold of the owner of the pictures, for example, on cute overload they were able to get a hold of the owner of a hamster who really didn’t like the hamster’s likeness being used all over the internet.
If you have constructive ideas send em in.
No…they be steelin yur propertieez!!!!
Thay has a myspace. I deletd themz.
i think it’s great that you are trying to give people credit – and it sounds like you’ve always tried to do that.
You’re also really quick to correct things when people give you information. Hooray, Cheezburger, Tofuburger, and crew!
Also, thanks for going after the lolcatz store at Cafe Press… I was wondering about that, myself.
Yay bergrrs … u alwyz do wuts rite.
if u know the owner of the pix (we can’t own all of them, srsly folks) or the captioner we’ll track them down and update the site.
this site is fun. tofuburger is the thinker, and i guess i’m the doer.
[quote comment="2941"]if u know the owner of the pix (we can’t own all of them, srsly folks) or the captioner we’ll track them down and update the site.
this site is fun. tofuburger is the thinker, and i guess i’m the doer.[/quote]
man, get something good going, and it immediately goes over to the lawyers. good luck guys!!!
[quote comment="2889"]Moreso, just adding text to an image found online does NOT make you the owner of that intellectual property. If anything, the person who took the picture owns the rights to it–no you, not your mommy, not the person who added the text.[/quote]
The person who took the original picture owns my caption? Wow, talk about your copyright maximalists.
By the way, you’re quoting my short poem “Not Your Mommy” in its entirety, which is infringement. Cease and Desist. Alternately, you can license that one and several others, including “You’re A Nazi” and “Piracy is Killing Music” for a reasonable yearly fee.
ROFL, church poet
I thought I owned “Cease and Desist” as my intellectual property! Who dares to use words without my permission!!! I feel like taking my Oxford unabridged dictionary and putting it into my computer and copyrighting all of the possibilities from henceforth – unless someone’s already copyrighted henceforth.
As stupid as it sounds, we’re just trying to clean up our act — so we can be around as long as you people want us.
Remember, have fun.
yet you continue with the ads on your site…hypocritical tossers
What does happen to caption-adders? I’ve submitted a few exclusives here, but I think most of the credit goes to the cuteologist photographers for catching such wonderful images. Man, would I be pissed off, though, if someone launched a jihad on lolcats just because they weren’t anal enough before to liscence the image before someone added a funny caption.
Creative Commons liscences were supposed to solve all this! >:O
First off: I use ICHC for a some great daily laughs and IMO you’re doing it right
Keep it up!
That said, I like to see captioning as fair use and your actions of:
-trying to find the (original) pic’s owners
-linking to any known pic-author
-and honoring their possible request 4 removal
is more than a ton of other sites do!
btw: by following the links on the science cats a week or 2 ago I found these “cat macros”: http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/ . Quite a few here recently seem to come from there, but here they are *better organized an tagged * muahahaha!
For those of you complaining about the hosts of this site being hypocrites, I do not see them making money off of the image of the Happy Cat. So how are they hypocrites?? Just wondering.
I think you guys are doing the right thing by trying to find the photogs and captioners of the pics. One of my cat pics I posted originally on Livejournal has been macro-ed (I has feets w/ the orange cat on a blue blanket) and I don’t care if it makes it’s way around the net, but being a photog/videographer by profession, I’d be a little upset if the pic made its way to a site that started selling the image, since all of my posted photos are (as far as I know) copyrighted on my own website in which I sell some of them. Sharing around the net is one thing, selling on shirts and other media however, is another.
Props to the mods for trying to do the right thing
[quote comment="2941"]if u know the owner of the pix (we can’t own all of them, srsly folks) or the captioner we’ll track them down and update the site.
this site is fun. tofuburger is the thinker, and i guess i’m the doer.[/quote]
Theres another store on cafepress called Funny kitties. They only have a few pics up but they are ones I’ve seen around here, hope that helps.
All photos I’ve sent you or put in comments are my own property, pictures of my own kittzies, taken with my own camera. No problem with rights there.
This is such a load of crap – I had no idea ICHC was staffed by the RIAA goons! What the heck are you trying to protect? Silly pictures of cats with funny captions are not a actual business asset. The whole dern point of the site was to /share/ the pictures – they wouldn’t be very funny if you just made them and hoarded them on your computer to browse when you were bored.
Until you revoke this absurd policy, I am adding ICHC to my adblock lists. You don’t get a penny in ad money from me (while still having to spend bandwidth serving me funny images). I encourage everone else to do the same.
-Oren
PS. I’m checking the “notify comments” thing so your email server has to send a bunch of useless mail to http://www.mailinator.com. I’m seriously that pissed.
Me too. Well, not my kitties, but my photo.s Do we get into hot water when we try to determine who owns the cats?
[quote comment="3001"]For those of you complaining about the hosts of this site being hypocrites, I do not see them making money off of the image of the Happy Cat. So how are they hypocrites?? Just wondering.[/quote]
The Google ads on this site bring in revenue.
Plus money-making doesn’t really affect the core copyright issue unless the images are specifically licensed in such a way (like creative commons no commercial use).
Well, there could be a few ways to solve this but it might interfere with all the fun. You could only accept pictures taken by “said” person and captioned by “said” person. But that limits your possibilities. People find things on the internet all the time that they would like to caption or poke fun at, even outside kitties, so you might miss out on some hilairous stuff. You might want to make it a requirement that when a captioned picture is sent that the email includes credit, and a source. Like you would for a school paper. That way everyone gets their credit and Cheezburger and Tofuburger can spend more time posting these awesome pictures, rather than researching, then posting. More fun a lot faster.
Lolcatz.com was around before this. These cats have been on many messageboards previously.
And for not making money: they get money from every click on those google ads. Even if it’s for purposes to break even, they are advertising.
My 2¢:
There would be less of a problem with image theft if you turned this into a membership only site, and charged a buck or two for exclusive rights to cover hosting/bandwidth expenses.
Adding captions to someone else’s photograph would fall under the category of a ‘derivative work’ and would thus be considered an infringement of the copyright of the orginal photographer unless they had given permission for the derivative work to be made.
This article makes it clear that both you and the cafepress site are on shaky ground even arguing fair use or parody.
http://www.artslaw.org/DERIV.HTM
Gladzz u r traing to be teh gewd. Still LOLzing in ur site frrm Sout africazz. Lvvvzz yrll. Hope the Google ads will pay some rent, and plz plz plzzzzz dnut stpo.
The problem with only accepting exclusive. original work from the original phtographers and authors:
You’d get a new cat pic once every few days. At best. Probably less.
I am a captioner. I have no camera and certainly no photography skills. I rely on anonyminity and good faith so that no one will try to claim the rights to mah funnies, and that the photographer won’t get their panties in a bunch. It’s the spirit of the internet– cool things appearing all the time from anonymously cool people, with Snopes.com occasionally tracking down the source if it’s particulary alarming or involves grubby-faced little children being in peril.
As for the cafepress people trying to make money off other people’s collaborative works? Can’t we just round them up and shoot them? Plz?
I like the way a pic off Cute Overload gets several captions about 5 mins after the newslwtter goes out.
wow, i would never buy stuff online :XD but thats just stupid
I haven’t purchased anything….but I do confess to placing some of your pics on my blog earlier this week, along with the link to icanhascheezburger.com. I hope that is OK; so many of my friends and family are pet lovers and our local newspaper, The News Tribune, featured your website in the “pop culture” section of last Friday’s paper. I totally credited you guys though and I know my friends came over here to check you out. The pictures were just too funny and cute to pass up sharing.
I would like to own a shirt with “I Can Has Cheezburger?” on the front and “I had a Cheezburger” on the back. Is there a legitimate place to buy shirts with the pics from this site on them?
Poopie on the haterz, indeed.
Copyright law is broken. The proof is in the fact that it is widely ignored.
You host the pictures so you aren’t stealing bandwidth, refusing to go on cafepress is self-explanatory, and offering links to the creators and the complying with “take it down” requests, are all evidence you guys are making an honest effort.
And that’s all we should expect from a small operation like yourself.
I seriously don’t mind the ads at all. Someone has to pay for the hosting and servers and etc. stuff that’s required to run a website that is obviously exponentially growing. As for the owners being hypocrites, I totally disagree. And I have a sneaking suspicion that those who cry “hypocrite” are the last ones who would donate money to keeping this site going.
In fact, now that I’ve thought about it, I may just go click on a few ads just to spite the people who are blocking them and to help out with funding. GO LOLCATS!
I’ve posted many, many of these hilarious pics on my MySpace, but I’ve copied them to my computer first so to not borrow the bandwidth here. If that’s wrong, then I don’t wanna be right. As JoJo said, they’re just too funny to pass up sharing.
http://nedminvestigation.ytmnd.com/
This has all the answers.
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
When someone takes a photograph, that photograph is automatically protected by copyright. One of the rights copyright secures to its creators is the right to make derivative works.
By taking someone else’s photograph, and adding a caption to it, you have done just that: made a derivative work. If you didn’t have that person’s permission to do it, you’ve just violated his copyright.
To then turn around and whine because *another* person then took that captioned photo, slapped it on a T-shirt, and sold it, is the utmost height of hypocrisy. He no more “stole” your work than you “stole” the original photographers.
Now, let’s dispense with the standard BS excuses:
1. “But we attribute our photos!” Irrelevant. Copyright law doesn’t have some hidden escape clause that says “Oh, but if you attributed your copyright violation, it’s okay.”
2. “But we take them down if someone complains!” Irrelevant. Copyright law doesn’t say “You can violate the author’s copyright, so long as he doesn’t notice.”
3. “But Cafe Press is making money!” Well, this page has ads on it. I’m not going to say you’re profitable, because I don’t know that, but in either case we’re talking about the same thing: derivative works of someone else’s copyright being used to generate revenue.
4. “But..Fair Use!” Look, in the first place, Fair Use isn’t an exemption, it’s a *defense*. Second, Fair Use is a vague, mostly judicially-interpreted thing. There’s no line you can point to such that everything on one side of it is Fair Use and the stuff on the other side is a violation. Factors looked at are the amount of material used, the transformative nature of the new work, and the purpose of the new work. And in all three cases, you and the Cafe Press guys are in the exact same boat. They use your entire caption, you use someone else’s entire photograph. You transform the original work into a cute and funny caption, they transform your cute and funny caption into a T-shirt that someone can walk around wearing. You use the stuff to generate revenue, they use the stuff to generate revenue.
There is no, repeat no reasonable interpretation of copyright law which says the Cafe Press people are “stealing” from you, but also that you are *not* “stealing” from the original photographers. The intelligent thing to do here is realize that neither of you are “stealing” from anyone, that at worst what you are doing is violating copyright in a completely non-harmful way, and to *not worry about it.*.
Yeesh.
I say again: Yeesh.
Pretty much all of them are from 4chan.
YTMND stole all of theirs from there.
I’m curious… if I wanted to put the image on a t-shirt for my personal use, and not distribute it, it would be fair use, correct?
Now, if someone realizes that many people would like said t-shirts and produces a lot of them to sell, it is NOT fair use, because they’re making money.
Now, if I pay someone to make a shirt for my personal use because I’m too lazy to do it myself, is that also fair use?
And if it is, why can’t the argument be made that the seller of these shirts simply anticipated our desire for such shirts and is accepting a service fee for having transferred the image onto shirts for our private use?
In all this BS that flows about copyright I have to ask… Do the CATS get their share of the profits?
Random kitties off teh internets with added words hardly count as stolen art (check my URL… I CARE about stolen art) and as far as I know you need to be making profits from aformentioned “stolen art” to be breaching copyright laws…
*looks at world* Who of you has ever downloaded a pic off teh internets?
Do you think you should be arrested for it??
Because you should!!! [/jest]
This site is all about FUN and if all credit is given where it is due, then I see no issues.
But that’s just me and I only submit pics of MY lolcat and yes, he gets what ever the hell he wants.
Including pounds of my flesh to inflict pain apon…
The original point of this thread was one person using ICHC pictures (tagged or no) for cafepress apparel. That’s making profit without securing access/use rights.
And for the cats, well, they don’t know the diff’rence either way: The snozzberries still taste like snozzberries, and they can all try the cheezburgers.
I agree with the teh shadow. Shut up and suck it up, and calm down.
And you CANNOT has cheezburger.
Intellekshual properteez … i haz it!