Two years ago, I took a video of my son pretending to talk on a cell phone. I posted the video on YouTube and it went viral. Not “Charlie Bit My Finger” viral, but it got almost a million views in the first week and was even aired on “The Today Show”.

It was the early days of my blog, and it was the first big burst of attention I received. It was very exciting, and a little weird. Mom and Buried was worried about exploiting Detective Munch and I was worried we weren’t exploiting him enough.

Turns out I was right, as the furor quickly died down and Dad and Buried faded back into obscurity along with the video…

UNTIL NOW!

While I was worried we weren’t exploiting our son enough, someone else had the idea to do it for us. Two years later, yesterday, the picture below appeared in my wife’s Facebook feed.

That’s a still from my video, with someone else’s slightly-funny-but-not-as-funny-as-my-own-might-have-been text superimposed onto it. Here I am, trying to create a meme, when someone else comes along and coopts my material to make one of their own!

Several people have come forward to tell me they’ve seen the same photo on their news feeds, and numbers show it has more than 10,000 shares. Unfortunately they aren’t my shares. And, the Internet being what it is – the Wild West mixed with Thunderdome – there’s little I can do to reclaim ownership of the image now that the web has taken hold of it.

So this is my attempt to take the power back and maybe get a little of that traffic thrown my way. Meanwhile, I’m going full Liam Neesons: tracking down the meme thief and burning their life to the ground.

No one exploits my son but ME. So if you see the meme above on your timeline or anywhere else, tell them it belongs to Dad and Buried and send them my way!