High res pic I took six years ago: 
The card reads: Warmest greetings from the DuMont publishing house. Have fun reading it!
The cover reads: Help, my cat is broken! 200 cats going beyond their limits
An old classic…steal it now, ask for forgiveness later. Funny pic though.
I suppose that’s most of the known world.
I’ll have you know your picture is one of my favorite cat memes. Great to see you in these parts of the Internet.
NGL if they used your photo on their cover, sending you a few copies of the book is the least they can do.
Since it’s a product being sold, and you’re the copyright holder of the image. That means they should not have been using that image without your explicit permission…
technically you could sue them, and I bet them sending you copies is their way of trying to buy out the fuckup so they don’t get sued. In theory you could demand a set percentage of all sales…
I actually asked them per email to send me the copies. While I get your point, I personally don’t hold any grudge at all, as long as people don’t claim my pics as their own. Which they don’t. It’s the nature of the internet that such pics spread all over the world without anybody at the end of the chain knowing the source. It’s just a silly little book and I doubt they’ll be making any serious money on this.
Still it’s shameful that people think they can profit off of others’ properties.
While I share that sentiment, it always baffles me how people seemingly selectively take an issue with it for physical media. If someone reposted that picture to Facebook, Instagram or Reddit, those platforms profit from someone else’s properties and it happens every day. Yet when it happens as a book, it’s far more likely to read comments like yours
A Facebook/Instagram/Reddit post doesn’t directly financially benefit them. You can’t monetise a single puppy photo or even a ton of them… At best you get some sponsorship out of it but even that is rare.
A physical book (usually) requires fronting a considerable amount of money AND it directly financially benefits the writer and publisher. So they’re literally profiting off your property, directly.
Placing ads between and beside such content is pretty direct profit. Look at the cat, they get paid for showing you some cat food brand.
I do not speak German, nor have I ever understood German
But why do I feel like that book is titled '“help my cat is dead”
Where did you put the photo for it to be used on a book?
I also thought that, but then I remembered my Latin:
Kaput comes from the Latin for “head”, caput. Knowing that but not knowing any German, my guess is because it looks like the cat’s head is in the basket instead of on its neck :)
Kaputt means “broken” or “non-functional” in German, like: Die Tasse von meiner Oma ist mir heruntergefallen. Nun ist sie kaputt. (I dropped my granny’s cup. It’s broken now.)
Here, it looks like the head of the cat is broken off.Nice, double meaning :)
Probably not intentional
Likely because “kaputt” translates to “kaput” in English, and depending on your region you may have heard something like “My computer went kaput” or “my car is kaput”. Usually means the thing is non-functional; so broken, dead, etc.
Don’t you think that just comes directly from the german word? Like how I’ve found ‘no problemo’ to work in pretty much any language I didn’t speak.
Oh yes definitely. I’m not a linguist (just a fan), but I’d assume the English “kaput” was what happened as German immigrants naturalized in English-speaking countries.
That is definitely it, my great grandparents loved that word
I just added a translation of everything. I put it on reddit back then and it went viral, especially the meme somebody made out of it with the caption: “French
aristocracyroyalty in the 18th century” and they posted it on r/dankmemes (can’t find the post without an account) plus someone else crossposted to r/historymemes. As usual, my r/aww post got 10k points, while both others got about 40k upvotes. Boredpanda asked me for an interview a few weeks thereafter: https://www.boredpanda.com/optical-illusion-cat-without-head-i-spin-bubbles/Edit: Links added
It’s funny, I remember when this picture blew up!
Thanks, now I feel old. But so does Koda, so I guess that’s fair. However I still don’t have a nice beard ;-(
Not dead just broken.
I don’t speak any German and can read that cover easily sometimes I forget it’s our sister language but damn.
two copies - nice, one for each cat!
… two cats? Oh.
