Kiwibank, a New Zealand state-owned bank, created Buck — a green-wooled, brown-eyed cartoon sheep meant to signal that the institution "bucks the system." A slick brand video showed Buck riding buses and drinking flat whites. The campaign did what bank campaigns do: it existed, briefly, in the periphery of attention. Then a tweet reading "I WANT TO FUCK THE KIWIBANK SHEEP" pulled in more than 4 million views, and Buck became the internet's favorite test case for corporate overreach. The bank's response was textbook Streisand Effect. Kiwibank filed copyright takedown notices against the original tweet and several posts featuring what the New Zealand outlet the Spinoff described as "sexy sheep art." The images vanished from specific posts. Then the hydra dynamic kicked in: every removal spawned dozens more mocking, remixed, and explicitly provocative posts. The attempt to control the narrative became the narrative. New Zealand's Free Speech Union weighed in with an open letter accusing the bank of weaponizing intellectual property law as a content moderation tool. "Using copyright to remove speech a company dislikes is censorship, even when the subject is a sheep," the union wrote. The framing matters: this is a state-owned institution using legal mechanisms designed to protect creative works to suppress jokes about its own marketing material. Kiwibank spokesperson Ben Mabon defended the takedowns as a response to "explicit and harmful content being shared using Buck's image," adding that "doing nothing wasn't the right thing to do because of the harmful content." The bank's characterization of memes as "harmful" is doing heavy lifting here — conflating crude humor with actual harm in a way that conveniently justifies suppression. John Oliver picked up the story on Last Week Tonight, noting the counterproductive nature of the response: "Basically a lot of New Zealanders are going 'I am Spartacus' right now." The comparison is apt. The copyright claims transformed scattered jokes into a collective act of defiance, complete with its own solidarity logic. Kiwibank eventually released a new video of Buck addressing the situation directly: "There's been some stuff made about me — put on the internet. And if you saw what I had seen, you'd be shocked." The video pivots to framing the episode as analogous to online harassment that "happens to a lot of people." It's a remarkable rhetorical move — a bank reframing mockery of its own ad campaign as a form of victimization, using the mascot itself as the sympathetic face. The episode crystallizes a recurring tension: institutions that enter public culture through branding cannot then claim exclusive control over how that culture responds. Copyright law was not designed to function as a reputation-management tool for state-owned banks embarrassed by memes. Every takedown notice trained more people to associate Kiwibank not with "bucking the system" but with trying to silence it.
