The idea of authorship in the age of download and edit  offers many important questions . What does it mean to create ? What is Art? What is a meme? Who owns the work of art ? Who has control over the artwork’s meaning ? A possible answer for many of those questions might be found focusing on theft. It is a common practice for administrators of accounts focused on memes to caption  their posts with the phrase stolen meme ,or simply Stolen. There are hundreds of  accounts and users  posting these memes categorized as  stolen. But in the lifecycle of a meme, it is very likely that the most amount of views, likes and other displayers  of  influence that it ever acquired, the most fame and attentions of a meme  will probably succeed  in a post made by someone who  stole the meme, not in an authorized or personal post by the author. But the benefits of a meme being  stolen  are  far beyond just  visibility and attention .  There is an immense potential for a meme to grow and evolve when taken out of its creator’s hands. Being seen by a horde of internet users, a meme can be visualized, downloaded, edited, recaptioned and sent forward in an incredible speed, enhancing its chances for randomly mutating into a viral, widely spread meme. Besides not having the most power over the destiny of a meme,  the author also has very little  autonomy over the meaning related to their creation. Each viewer will interpret the meme in a particular way, some of those viewers with particular and unique ways, will also be tempted to download  and edit this meme. The fragility of the concept of author and authorship in a media that frequently violates copyright laws  as a way of existing. Images and templates that compose the  meme  are more often than not, fragments  that were sampled and democratized in an  unauthorized way.   The  constant stealing, or anonymous reposting of memes distances them from their creators  to a point in  which it doesn't matter who the original author was.  French theorist Roland Barthes argues that  “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”(Barthes, 1977 , p.147).  While discussing internet memes, most arguments won’t be limited by any restraints that this idea of an author could offer. This lack of limits in the interpretation could be one explanation to the generally mentioned feelings of emptiness or nonsense provoked by some memes, but it is not to be seen as something negative, unless that is the intention of the viewer in his equally creative act of perceiving and interpreting the meme. One great example of this expanded , collaborative authorship  can be found on Tik Tok®, where  videos , audios or image filters can be assembled into  editable templates. An original video made by one clueless user might become a global trend within minutes, in this dynamic of sampling and appropriating each other’s work,  innumerable pieces with the most diverse meanings can be born out of   a single  composition. The video bellow shows how fast and how far a content can go when posted online. A simple video of a man introducing his girlfriend, can be reproduced multiple times and further edited by different people, creating a completely new narrative, with the potential to infinite meanings, interpretations and re-interpretations:

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