Putting a dollar value on the language of the internet will be weird

For over a decade, the image of a young girl smirking in the foreground as a home in the background is engulfed in flames has circulated as fodder for countless memes. The picture, known simply as Disaster Girl, though originally taken by an amateur photographer — who then entered it into an online contest, sparking its journey across the web — has all but officially entered the public domain. That is, until Thursday, at least technically speaking.

The Raleigh News & Observer reports that the then-young girl in the photo, Zoe Roth (now 21), recently sold the image as a Non-Fungible Token, or NFT, for 180 Ether — the cryptocurrency for the Etherium blockchain — worth somewhere in the vicinity of $450,000 at the time (at writing, 180 Ether is valued at approximately $500,000). With the sale, Roth has also assured that she will receive 10% of any sale of the NFT in the future — a kind of digital residual.

Yet, the image, like any digital asset, remains public. If anything, the Disaster Girl memes will likely spread even more with news of the sale. But is the image still the same, now that it’s technically been sold? It’s unclear from the coverage whether the copyright to Disaster Girl was transferred as part of the sale of the NFT, but even if not, there is something fundamental about the image that’s now different.

While memes have been endlessly replicated on consumer products for years (and things like dances have been used to create profits their original creators never see) — that is, memes are commodified — the meme itself, whether an image or an action, has remained transferable at no cost. These have been visual or social commodities, not in and of themselves financial commodities. But what happens when a meme image is made into an NFT, when it is sold to an owner, even if that owner doesn’t retain the copyright?

In practice, there is no difference. For the internet at large, Disaster Girl is the same, being far too popular for far too long to be reigned in at this point. Disaster Girl is ours, no matter who owns the NFT. But for meme images yet to emerge, Disaster Girl’s sale raises the possibility that the underlying assumptions about meme images will likely change.

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Source: https://cfhorgan.medium.com/what-happens-when-memes-are-commodities-a1baddf84bc6?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency