The vast majority of memes are based on a set of non-free images. While in practice, the free sharing of these images is tolerated to a certain degree, in theory, such sharing is not permitted under traditional copyright law! […] To allow you to freely share your favorite memes, Framasoft offers this series of free alternatives to several well-known memes.
What they’ve done here is recreate by hand several popular memes or image macros and pair them with an online generator for editing the text.
Some of those are good replacements for the originals. In fact I’ve seen at least one of them before. Others aren’t so great. Still a good initiative! Though I think memes might be already protected as critique and/or commentary.
From copyright perspective, I think this is an interesting move but I think a big part of meme culture is that they are direct popular culture references rather than just images with funny text. There’s a personal connection with memes that are from media you’ve enjoyed yourself.
I think a great example is the Spiderman trio meme that hits way different than the Framamèmes version that could only ever work if you know the original already.
I don’t think that’s an issue; these memes are so well-known that anyone looking at la version frama is surely going to be reminded of the original. Memeception …
