Supreme Court Hands Legal Defeat to Former Iowa Rep. Steve King, a Person You’d Hopefully Forgotten About Before Right Now
Parents who own the copyright to memes featuring their kid’s face do not like it when white nationalist politicians use their intellectual property without permission.
In January 2020, Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King was facing a tough re-election bid, thanks primarily but not exclusively to his decision two years earlier, in an interview with The New York Times, to bemoan the fact that terms like “white nationalist” had become “offensive.” (The excesses of Woke Culture—will they never cease??) In an effort to jump-start his fundraising efforts, King turned to the surest method for getting your average Republican Facebook user to pay attention and, with any luck, to share a credit card number: decade-old memes.
If you were online in the mid-2000s, you will remember the ubiquity of “Success Kid,” a photo of 11-month-old Sammy Griner triumphantly clenching his fist while attempting, as 11-month-olds tend to do, to eat sand on a Florida beach. Sammy’s mother, Laney, wisely registered the copyright to the image, allowing her to license it for use in advertising campaigns for Coca-Cola, Virgin Mobile, and others. One party to whom she did not license an adorable candid of her then-infant son, however, was Steve King, who nonetheless ran an ad on his official campaign Facebook page that prominently featured young Sammy’s face, imploring anyone who “enjoys our memes” to “click the link below and throw us a few dollars to make sure the memes keep flowing and the Lefties stay triggered.”
Laney, dismayed by a vile xenophobe’s appropriation of her intellectual property, promptly got lawyers involved, alleging that King’s “record of vitriolic criticism” reflected poorly on the “good-natured, friendly message” that Success Kid imparted to “millions of Americans,” and demanding that he refund any donations received as a result of his unauthorized use. (“I do not endorse Representative King, and like most people, I strongly disagree with his views,” she wrote on Twitter.) When King’s campaign refused to settle, Laney sued for copyright infringement, and in 2022, a jury found in her favor and awarded her damages of $750.
King, who has had considerably more time on his hands since getting absolutely waxed in his 2020 re-election bid, appealed. Not until earlier this week, when the U.S. Supreme Court denied King’s cert petition without comment, did this case finally, mercifully come to a close, thus clearing the way for Laney to buy a mid-range 4K television with Steve King’s money next time Black Friday rolls around.
King’s legal argument was, essentially, that Laney had targeted him unfairly, since she had previously tolerated uses of the Success Kid meme from plenty of people who do not have public records of promoting white supremacists and neo-Nazis on social media. “When Griner asks the social media universe to create the Meme, and it does, her capacity to single out individual copyists ought to be severely curtailed,” his lawyers wrote. It is a challenge for me to imagine a case to which I could be less sympathetic. May news of an elderly racist’s defeat in an obscure battle for the right to a Facebook post be the last headline you ever encounter that reminds you of Steve King’s existence.
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