I Can Haz Intellectual Property? How ICanHasCheezburger.com Stole our Idea for a Satellite Site

If this isn’t the first time you’ve ever visited a site on the internet, I assume you’ve heard of icanhascheezburger (ICHC), and the meme it popularized, “lolcats.” If this is your first internet destination ever, I’m supremely honored.

Anyways, I’m a big lolcat fan, and so is my law school friend, who we’ll call Elvis (using her cat’s name for the purposes of anonymity). In late January, we decided to take the lolcat meme to the next level, and started a blog (“Pollcats” – get it?) using lolcaptions and political figures to make hilarious political points. Example to the right. The site did tolerably well, but not very well. So, on February 11th, we decided to e-mail the folks at ICHC to ask if they’d put a link to our site on theirs, owing to the unity of our missions. The e-mail follows.

Re: a lol* site we’d like you to see!
From: Ames <xxxx@nyu.edu>
Date: February 11, 2008 10:06:00 AM EST
To: lol@icanhascheezburger.com
Cc: **********@gmail.com

My friend [Elvis] and I are long time fans of your site, and we’ve started a lol* spinoff site for making fun of political candidates. It’s http://pollcats.blogspot.com/, and we think it’s pretty awesome… and we’re pretty sure you’ll agree :-). What we were wondering is, since we’re a brand-new site, would you mind giving us a plug on your site some day? Or do you have any advice for us on how to garner traffic? We think we’re deserving…

The proprietors of ICHC never responded. At least, not directly. But, on March 18th, five weeks after our e-mail and almost two months after we launched our site, they launched their own version of our exact idea, titled “PunditKitchen” (link to first ever entry). While I can’t guarantee they ever read our e-mail… I have to wonder, especially given the month lagtime.

Of course, this may be an innocent case of two people coming up with the same idea at the same time, a la Newton & Leibniz. I call it fluxions, you call it “the calculus”; I call it “Pollcats,” you call it “Pundit Kitchen.” Even assuming the worst, Elvis and I lacked the resources to popularize the idea, as we’d clearly indicated, and especially because you can’t copyright an idea as general as ours, ICHC’s owners were within their rights to take the idea and run. Especially when the site they’ve ended up developing from the idea is, in fact, superb.

But a little credit would have been nice…