Free Content Is a Service, and We Should Tip Like It
A proposal for compensating the creators who make the internet great
How many corporations do you think have made a profit by using the term “on fleek”? How much profit? Whatever the number, it’s certainly more than Kayla Newman — aka Peaches Monroee, the teenager who coined the term in a Vine clip in 2014 — ever made.
From IHOP and Denny’s to JetBlue and Taco Bell, countless companies — acting on studies that insist young consumers want to have a “dialogue” with brands — have overhauled their marketing strategies over the past decade with a new approach built almost entirely on cribbing memes and slang from online youth culture. Like “on fleek,” most of these pop-cultural touchstones were made for free and gained popularity organically on user-generated sites, where users must relinquish ownership by default; it costs precisely nothing to appropriate them for marketing purposes. Sometimes the creators of these memes gain fame and fortune, but most often, for their contributions to both culture and commerce, they get nothing.
“Put plainly, there is no recognized ownership,” wrote Doreen St. Félix in 2015. (Newman, now 19, did recently launch a beauty company named after the phrase she coined, but because the phrase was never trademarked, so have many others.)…
