The little guy managed to prove through an absolute avalanche of community remix that he made the original weird little drawing on the internet. On websites basically designed to be anonymous and contribution free, in communities that really hate people identifying themselves.

It taught me that without removing copyright as a legal concept, people can come from left field to claim things after they get popular and ruin what has been adopted as community owned.

Like the trollface image itself is one thing, but its popularity, that makes it valuable in terms of merchandising, has come from not just the original image but its endless viral remixes and crossovers. Thats communal labor that has suddenly been enclosed and monetised.

You can have a community of iconoclasts communally creating content without expectation of recompense and one bloke can stick their head up and ruin it for everyone.

etc etc etc. Needs to die. For this reason and what Conde Nast did to Doc Savage.