An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself.
Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.
Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds.
It's good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it's good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.
Actually, attorneys say, copying a purchased CD for even one friend violates the federal copyright code most of the time.
I think you can have moderate success by copying something else, but if you really want to knock it out of the park, you have to do something different and take chances.
It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.