I'd guess that small (or just large & blurry) is the idea -- to make the criteria for the exception depend on having the quality be less than the original. Stil

I'd guess that small (or just large & blurry) is the idea -- to make the criteria for the exception depend on having the quality be less than the original. Still, small and legal is better than illegal? > memes feel like they easily and cleanly fall under "parody", and perhaps "critique" categories. I feel like the problem with that claim is the parody and/or critique is very commonly not related to the subject of the image in any way. It seems strange to claim I should be able to fairly use a copyrighted picture of a famous person in order to comment on memes, or vegetables, or (super commonly) as a completely random funny backdrop to a saying. The ideas behind the parody and critique exceptions in fair use is that you can use a picture of Patrick Stewart to make comments about Patrick Stewart's acting or something he said in an interview, not that you can use a copyrighted picture of Patrick Stewart to comment on use of fonts on the internet, just because he happens to have a pose that makes the saying seem funny. When I Google "memes" right now and look at images, I see an entire page of copyrighted images, and only one of them (out of 26 images on the first page) has text relevant to the image. The other 25 are not making a parody of the person(s) in the image, or critique something even remotely relevant to the image.