Memes are just another form of creative expression, like songwriting and tattooing.
And just like songs and tattoos can be plagiarized, memes can be too.
Unlike songwriting and tattooing, we have a very open space for taking inspiration from existing memes or adding something to them, that allows for the new work to qualify as original too.
And because memes usually aren't a source of considerable income and because of the nature of cool and awesome memers, reusing memes after crediting the original creators is very common and widely acceptable to the creators. Things like this wouldn't fly with songwriters.
We need to be thankful for this gift of nature and use it wisely, instead of abusing the repost tradition, so as to not take away anything from the creative genius of original memers.
Caption this Meme