well I waffled on this. An early edit of the post pretty much said exactly this (use your own original photography), but I ended up editing the "supplication" at the end of the post to include fair use. I did a little reading on the legality of using copyright protected images in memes and the general consensus seems to be that this is okay as fair use in most cases. Specific examples I saw cited were stills from movies and photographs of celebrities - which are obviously NOT the property of the meme creator - but still typically considered fair use for memes. Now this does get into some tricky ground here, because fair use in the US is typically most solid when the use is non-commercial. It could be argued that every Steem post is "commercial" because of the payout mechanism. Ultimately I decided that the spirit of #originalmeme is that the meme itself be original (original words / original joke, etc.) but not necessarily the image used itself. That being said, I would certainly think a truly exceptional meme that uses original photography (like a cat meme or something) or that uses open source / free use imagery would make it easier for me to make an argument to a @curie reviewer that it deserves a big @curie upvote. Not sure that this response really settles anything. Any questions? LOL