Know Your Meme tracks Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop on the internet

The pepper spray incident at the University of California Davis campus has gone viral. And one place where people are expressing their reaction on the internet is on the Know Your Meme website, run by Seattle startup Cheezburger Network.

Know Your Meme is becoming a favorite Facebook “like,” and the site has captured about 900 uploaded images of pop icons and people from history falling victim to “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop.” Photos on Know Your Meme show how people have used photo-editing software to imagine musician Tom Waits, General Grant, the Morton Salt Umbrella Girl, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others getting the pepper spray treatment.

Know Your Meme is not all fun and games. The site has traced how the original shot of police officer John Pike pepper spraying students -- taken Nov. 19 by Louise Macabitas -- quickly spread on the internet. The next day, Photoshopped versions of the image appeared on Reddit. And it took off from there, according to Know Your Meme:

The second (photo) placed Lt. Pike in the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull. The same afternoon, Lt. Pike was placed in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) by Tumblr blog It Makes No Sense where it received over 2400 notes in a day.

The images started popping up on Facebook and other sites, and also started appearing on media sites like the Washington Post, ABC News and Gawker.

Cheezburger Network bought the Know Your Meme website in March. Know Your Meme -- which was created by the internet video network Rocketboom -- documents viral videos, image macros, catchphrases and web celebs.

Cheezburger Network runs a network of more than 40 comedy web sites. The company raised $30 million in venture capital in January. The company is backed by Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital.