About

Copying Dog refers to an image of a dog sitting on his hind legs, similar to a painting of a dog shown above him. After being posted online in the early 2010s, the image became an object labeling meme in March of 2018 where the painting would be labeled an original idea and the dog labeled something that copied the original idea.

Origin

The image of the dog began spreading online in September of 2012. On September 22nd, 2012, comedy writer Megan Ganz^[1] tweeted the original image of the dog, named Delmar, gaining over 130 retweets and 140 likes (shown below).

Spread

The image spread on blogs in the following weeks. It appeared on That Cute Site^[2] on October 9th, 2012, as well as WeKnowMemes.^[3] It did not begin seeing use as a meme template until several years later. On March 26th, 2018, examples were posted to /r/dankmemes^[4] (shown below, left) and /r/MemeEconomy^[5] (shown below, right) that gained over 5,100 and 3,100 upvotes, respectively.

In the /r/dankmemes thread, user kaurkal posted the template for the meme (shown below, left). Kaurkal also posted the Tesla/Edison example to /r/MemeEconomy,^[6] where it gained over 14,000 upvotes. After the template was posted, several more posts featuring the dog were posted to the subreddit. While the Tesla/Edison example remained the most popular, another popular post mocking the US government for copying Minecraft YouTubers gained over 290 upvotes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References