Whose LOLcats are those anyway?

The Novem­ber 2008 issue of Hawaii Busi­ness mag­a­zine has a cover story called How Wez Made Mil­lionz Wit Dis Foto, on icanhaszheezburger.com and the site’s cofounders Kari Unebasami and Eric Nak­a­gawa. The arti­cle coin­cides with the pub­li­ca­tion of their web site’s first book, I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOL­cat Col­leck­shun. The book con­tains 200 pic­tures selected from the site’s col­lec­tion of cap­tioned photos.

Kari used to work at Hawaii Busi­ness magazine’s par­ent com­pany, Pacific Basin Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, so the cover story is the usual “locals make good” puff piece that is a sta­ple for Hon­olulu publications.

There’s no dis­cus­sion of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues involved in licens­ing and pub­lish­ing these pho­tographs. I heard Eric briefly men­tion this issue at the Manoa Geeks on 1 August 2008, and I’d won­dered if the pub­lisher wanted pho­tographs that were the sole prop­erty of the site.

LOL­cat asks about timely response to a legal request

That would have been an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion, espe­cially since icanhascheezburger.com has a copy­right tips page that advises users to post pic­tures they took them­selves. Many of the images on icanhascheezburger’s com­pan­ion site PunditKitchen.com are cap­tioned ver­sions of news ser­vice pho­tos. The sites’ terms of use page includes the stan­dard DMCA notice, but also assigns copy­right for every image that users con­tribute to the site to Pet Holdings.

It makes me won­der what Reuters, Cor­bis and the Asso­ci­ated Press might say regard­ing the fair use of their pho­tos by these web sites. I’m not a lawyer, but I am curi­ous what Larry Lessig or other Cre­ative Com­mons advo­cates would say about this.

Last week, Pet Hold­ings released an iPhone app that lets users browser through the sites’ recent images. Upcoming ver­sions will let iPhone users sub­mit their own cap­tioned pho­tos to the sites. For other mobile phones, there’s icanlol.com/iphone/. See iPhone App for tak­ing Cheezburg­ers To Go for more details.

Barack who?

When I saw the mag­a­zine on the new­stand, my first reac­tion was “Why isn’t Barack Obama on the cover?” It is the Novem­ber 2008 issue, and the Honolulu’s most famous high school grad­u­ate. Kari and Eric have a great story to tell, but wouldn’t Obama’s pic­ture on the cover sell more copies? Sure, it’s a bit of a gam­ble to put a pres­i­den­tial candidate’s pic­ture on a monthly mag­a­zine dur­ing Elec­tion Day, but the poten­tial ben­e­fits and rev­enue seem to out­weigh the risks.

Then again, the cat book was pub­lished in Octo­ber 2008, so the arti­cle is more of a pro­mo­tional piece than any­thing else. There is some dis­cus­sion of Kari and Eric’s roles as entre­pre­neurs, but Kari admits that she and Eric got lucky with a well-timed idea:

“It was for fun,” says Unebasami. “Then it got pop­u­lar and we had to adjust to that.”

The Hawaii Busi­ness arti­cle also men­tions that Kari and Eric sold their site to Pet Hold­ings, a com­pany owned by Ben Huh, for an “undis­closed sum”. The arti­cle does list Time Magazine’s esti­mate of US$2 mil­lion as the sale price. I found Time magazine’s arti­cle, The Mas­ter of Memes, in the ref­er­ence list for Wikipedia’s arti­cle about icanhascheezburger.com. That explains the title of the Hawaii Busi­ness mag­a­zine arti­cle. Two mil­lion pre-tax dol­lars meets the min­i­mum copy­writ­ing def­i­n­i­tion of “millions”. 

What about 4chan?

Still, it’s a sur­prise that the Hawaii Busi­ness arti­cle doesn’t men­tion 4chan at all. It’s almost as if that Lev Gross­man never wrote that arti­cle for Time. Grossman’s arti­cle isn’t about Eric, Kari or Ben at all. It’s about a man called Christoper Poole, bet­ter known as moot, and his web site, 4chan. 4chan is an image board where users post and com­ment on pic­tures. Some 4chan mem­bers believe the LOL­cat meme, includ­ing the catch­phrases Catur­day and “Do not want!” began on 4chan’s boards, and that icanhascheezburger.com is prof­it­ing from the meme. Wikipedia’s arti­cle on 4chan has some addi­tional background.

Instead, Hawaii Busi­ness writ­ers Jolyn Oki­moto Rosa and Scott Rad­way report the fol­low­ing story behind Kari’s rel­a­tive anonymity:

[icanhascheezburger.com] started as a lark and Unebasami wasn’t sure she wanted to be known as one of the founders of that quirky cat Web site. So she asked for anonymity.

As I pointed out in my billso.com arti­cle of 26 April 2008, Hon­olulu LOL­cats founder Kari Unebasami reveals her­self, Kari had claimed that she main­tained her anonymity because of rude email mes­sages and per­ceived threats from uniden­ti­fied 4chan members.

Thus, arti­cles such as BusinessWeek’s piece from 13 July 2007 called Blog­gers Bring in the Big Bucks don’t men­tion Kari by her real name. She’s just called tofuburger in these articles.

It’s a bit hard to keep all of these sto­ries straight, espe­cially since the home page of Ben Huh’s blog lists his wife as tofuburger.

Images appear cour­tesy of lawgeek and J.G.L. on flickr through a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

The about box from Ben Huh’s blog

Related arti­cles and pages on billso.com

• Copy­right and fair use
• Cre­ative Commons
• 1 August 2008: Last night’s Manoa Geeks meeting
• 15 June 2008: The Asso­ci­ated Press and fair use on the Web
• 26 April 2008: Hon­olulu LOL­cats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself

Tagged as: copyright, Creative-Commons, fair-use, Hawaii, Honolulu, LOL, lolcats, Oahu, obama, politics, president