In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made of a synthesized voice repeating the sound of a meow and titled the upload Nyan Cat. Torres had called his creation Pop-Tart Cat.

This episode uses that accident to ask who owns a meme. The video became the fifth most viewed on YouTube that year and spread into games, a Windows progress bar, and a cryptocurrency called Nyancoin. Torres registered copyrights and trademarks, reclaimed a hijacked domain, and joined Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt in suing Warner Bros. over the game Scribblenauts. A decade after the doodle, he sold a remastered version as an NFT for 300 ether.

• The song began on the Japanese site Niconico in July 2010, built with Hatsune Miku Vocaloid software, and the viral video used a later cover made with the UTAU program.
• Torres accepted the name the internet gave his character instead of fighting it.
• US trademark law obliged Torres to defend his mark or risk losing it, and Warner Bros. and developer 5th Cell settled in September 2013.
• The February 2021 NFT sale brought roughly $587,000 for verified ownership of the artist’s official copy, not the copyright.
• In March 2019 the YouTube channel hosting the original viral upload passed to Means TV, a worker-owned streaming cooperative.