Getty wants you to pay to use Socially Awkward Penguin

Getty Images has 'pursued and settled' multiple infringement cases involving Socially Awkward Penguin.

Socially Awkward Penguin is arguably one of the most recognisable memes on the internet. The blue-backgrounded image of the off-balance penguin - superimposed with funny text - has been plastered across every message board, forum and social network on the web. It's an inside joke. An icon. A mascot, even.

It's also the intellectual property of National Geographic, which - awkward - suddenly wants internet users to pay up for posting it.

In the past year, the company's licensing agency, Getty Images, has "pursued and settled" multiple infringement cases involving Socially Awkward Penguin, says The Washington Post. All of those actions were carried out in secret, with blogs and other posters agreeing to non-disclosure.

But over the summer, when Getty attempted to collect almost US$900 ($1.4 million) in licensing fees from a German blog, its parent site, getDigital, published Getty's letters online. And the ensuing outrage has sparked a wide-ranging debate about what internet creativity, ownership and culture should look like.

"The Awkward Penguin is not just a random image we stole from Getty's database, but one of the most well-known internet memes," the company said in its blog post. Bastian Krug, the online marketing manager at getDigital, says: "We have no idea why they chose us." This is not the first time someone has tried to play the copyright card over a well-known meme: The viral depot Know Your Meme keeps a public log of its copyright takedown requests, which have included everything from Good Girl Gina to Scumbag Stacy.

Socially Awkward Penguin. Picture / Meme Generator

But Getty is an unusually powerful player - and Socially Awkward Penguin is a singularly ubiquitous, beloved image. The goofy-looking adelie penguin was photographed in Antarctica by veteran photojournalist George Mobley. It took off online in 2009, when someone on 4chan thought to add the blue background and slap on captions that describe universally awkward settings: "hold the door ... they're too far away," or "watch a movie with your family ... there's a bedroom scene". A popular Tumblr blog, called "F- Yeah Socially Awkward Penguin", has spent six years chronicling the meme, one of the innumerable blogs and web sites to republish, remix and reshare it.

Is the whole argument silly? Yeah. It's a talking penguin. But it's also the cornerstone of a thriving, mash-up culture, one that transforms even the most staid nature photography into commentaries on politics, technology and modern life.

"Culture is remixing content, borrowing ideas, accessing ideas to make something new," says Tim Hwang, a researcher at the thinktank Data and Society. "We don't want to end up chilling cultural production." Alas, experts don't know whether memes and image macros count as "cultural products" or "transformations" in the legal sense.

If courts do interpret these memes as works of art or commentary, then they don't owe anything to Getty and its ilk. No one has ever mounted that defence though, and it hasn't been tested in court: in order for that to happen, some small-time blog will have to wage a very expensive lawsuit against a much larger company.

Instead, most do what getDigital did: pay up and delete it.

- Washington Post-Bloomberg