Nyan Cat: How a Charity Doodle Became a $587,000 NFT

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In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made of a synthesized voice repeating the sound of a meow and titled the upload Nyan Cat. Torres had called his creation Pop-Tart Cat.

This episode uses that accident to ask who owns a meme. The video became the fifth most viewed on YouTube that year and spread into games, a Windows progress bar, and a cryptocurrency called Nyancoin. Torres registered copyrights and trademarks, reclaimed a hijacked domain, and joined Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt in suing Warner Bros. over the game Scribblenauts. A decade after the doodle, he sold a remastered version as an NFT for 300 ether.

The song began on the Japanese site Niconico in July 2010, built with Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software, and the viral video used a later cover made with the UTAU program.
Torres accepted the name the internet gave his character instead of fighting it.
US trademark law obliged Torres to defend his mark or risk losing it, and Warner Bros. and developer 5th Cell settled in September 2013.
The February 2021 NFT sale brought roughly $587,000 for verified ownership of the artist's official copy, not the copyright.
In March 2019 the YouTube channel hosting the original viral upload passed to Means TV, a worker-owned streaming cooperative.

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