Pant vs. Zobie
On August 28th, 2018, a man named Martin Pant posted an image of a puppy he drew on the popular site Facebook. This image was listed under CC BY-NC-SA, a variation of the creative commons license which allows non-commercial remixes and tweaks, so long as credit is given to the original creator. A month after the posting, Dave Crazee reformatted the image into what is known as a “meme”, providing credit to Mr. Pant in the original posting. Following this, others began to repost the image and reformat it, failing to provide credit to Mr. Pant. After about a week, none of the “memes” posted provided any credit to the original image.
One such re-poster was a certain Edgar Zobie. Zobie began to gain fame and profit from the meme through ad revenue on a meme site. He even went as far as to claim credit for making the meme popular. Mr. Pant noticed this, however, and decided to complain to Mr. Zobie about violating the creative commons license his image was listed under. However, Mr. Zobie refused to remove the images, claiming that “they belonged to the internet” due to their status as memes. Due to this, Mr. Pant decided to take legal action against Mr. Zobie for violating his creative commons, suing him for one hundred thousand dollars, and seeking a possible way to get the meme permanently removed, as, according to Mr. Pant, the popularization of the meme hurt his ability to sell prints of it to make a living
After working its way through the lower courts, the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, who decided to hear it due to its relevance to the EU’s new regulations on licensing. In the case Pant v. Zobie, the court will decide whether images continue to have the same protections when their original source material is long lost, and whether harsher regulations should be applied to images in order to protect the rights an original creator has to their images.