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.
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.
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
