It all depends on where you sit but the new way of the internet is syndication for almost anyone wanting to promote something. Nobody is going to pay you for your content.
You are better off getting it out there for people to see, act and perhaps buy.
That means that unless you are a newspaper, a movie studio or book publisher you want people to copy and take and distribute your stuff to create, in the cliched words of internet marketing, the viral effect. It means that most companies can forget copyright and all that expensive advice from their intellectual property lawyers. And then there’s Constantin Films, a production company that owns the rights to the arty niche 2004 movie Der Untergang (or Downfall in English) the source of most of the most popular internet memes ever.
Unless you’ve been living behind the great internet wall of China you can’t have failed to see this meme where the last days of the fuhrer in his bunker are parodied. The German dialogue is subtitled in English giving a hilarious commentary to some internet or current event too numerous to mention. We all had a laugh and many millions of people – 4 million in the case of “Hitler gets banned from X-box live” – watched these video memes.
The point is that this meme took a little known essentially arthouse film and put it on the map. I can’t imagine it has done any harm. People who would have never seen the film – and would have never paid for the rights for the film – have done an enormous service to Constantin Films.
I think we can be pretty sure a few people were reminded to see the movie too.
Sure there is a thing called copyright, mainly used to protect the likes of Walt Disney and dead artists.
But it increasingly is at odds with the realities of the internet world.