The Man Who Owns the Trollface Is Not Mad

Carlos Ramirez was around twenty years old when he drew a face in MS Paint that would eventually pay his rent indefinitely. The face had a wide, irregular grin and the specific expression of someone who has just posted something on the internet and is now sitting back, perfectly still, waiting for the reaction. He posted it to 4chan—that permanently condemned corner of the web where the worst impulses in human communication get tested at scale—watched it become a defining image of early internet culture, and then, in 2010, filed the trademark paperwork. While everyone else was using it freely, he was covering his position.

According to Kotaku, he now pulls somewhere between five and fifteen thousand euros a month from it. Not from merchandise he makes himself—from pursuing the people who make merchandise without asking first. T-shirt designers, game developers, film studios: anyone who puts the Trollface on something and tries to turn a profit hears from his lawyers before long. The "U mad?" that launched ten thousand comment threads has found its most perfect and final target, which is everyone who assumed the image belonged to the internet.

The meme as intellectual property is a genuinely strange situation. The entire premise of a meme is that it propagates without permission, that it belongs to the network rather than any single origin point. But the network didn’t invent the Trollface—one specific person did, on one specific night, and then did the one thing nobody thinks to do: secured it legally before the moment passed. The irony is almost too neat to be real. The image that exists to mock people who are upset about things outside their control is now legally controlled by one man who has very little to be upset about.

4chan will never forgive him. He has already forgiven them for everything, because financially speaking, they made him.