From the perspective of a content thief...
 

Apparently there's a group of people out there who rationalize content theft by linking back to the source of the content.

Well... at least it makes tracking them down easy enough. :1orglaugh

http://sarahchristine.com/post/60859...ight-violation

Crack smokers.

LOL, you've been on GFY since 2001 and you've just now discovered that bloggers exist?

Just go hang around on 1q69, that place is home to some of the biggest content thieves online.

Sure bloggers have been around for ages... I am a big fan of Engadget, Autoblog, Dpreview, Jalopnik, Gizmodo, etc.

I'm just blown away by the ignorance shown when I found a blog network (Tumblr) that appears to aggregate users who all seem to celebrate copyright infringement. Who would have guessed an entire user base would adamantly defend such a thing?

Xenigo, I was being a little bit sarcastic because I assumed you actually did know about the blogging culture, but were pretending to be astonished by it.

Now I see by your second post that you really have just discovered it. Wow.

Those blogs you named aren't really part of the blogging culture per se; they are huge commercial bloglike webmagazines, part of a corporate network that has sprung up out of the blogging culture. But the corporate guys, for the most part, are respecters of copyrights, and thus not part of the blogging culture generally. The biggest reason they aren't blogs is that they don't share bloggers' attitudes toward intellectual property.

The larger blogging culture, which has been around for more than a decade now, has very little regard for traditional notions of copyright law. They are not, properly speaking, content thieves in the way the term is usually understood on GFY, because your typical GFY content thief has both a profit motive and deliberate criminal intent. Your typical blogger has neither. Rather, he's simply part of a culture in which people are publishing for reasons other than profit, and so everybody in that culture has a shared understanding that stuff they publish will be republished without permission. There are intricate expectations and cultural norms governing the nature of the credits that must be given, but permission and payment? Neither expected nor offered -- and anybody who asks is automatically the world's biggest asshole.

It is, pure and simple, a different internet subculture than the one most GFYers are used to. But it's huge and it's old and it's astonishing that you had not discovered it before tonight, because it comes into conflict with the porn business all the freakin' time. For obvious reasons.

A blogger's view of intellectual property:

1) The internet is for sharing and linking. If you don't want people reposting something, you shouldn't post it on the internet in the first place, you dumbhead. Because this is what the internet is for. Duh.

2) If you repost something a blogger posted, it's a compliment. But only if you link back to the blogger. If you don't link back to him, then you're a thief, or at least a dickhead.

3) If you are the true legal copyright owner of something that you discover on a blog, the polite thing to do is to write to the blog owner and nicely ask to have your ownership or authorship credited by means of a link to your website. Which must be cheerfully granted. Anything else you do -- like complain to the host, or file a DCMA notice, or rudely demand the removal of the content -- makes you a dickhead.

4) Everyone is aware that there are a bunch of obsolete laws out there that don't match these cultural norms. And from time to time, various dickheads will invoke those laws, and posts or blogs will be lost. Shit happens. It's just a cost of doing business. But culturally, in the blogging world, you don't want to be one of those dickheads.

That's the blogging culture. I'm not trying to defend it, any more than I would try to defend 4chan. It just is.

If they are posting it to comment on it then it should fall under the safe harbor provisions of the dmca

point is they are just commenting on it, and don't mean any harm

but there are others out there that dont care and blatantly will do things like sell pictures that people took of celebrities without the photographers permission and stuff like that knowing fully well they shouldnt and that they are infringing on the photographers copyright but they just do it anyways because 'everyone does it'

pretty much every celebrity nudes/sexy pics site is run off that premises, i doubt there are any that hire their own photographers/buy pictures.

Interesting explanation Forkbeard. I was not aware there was a subset of blogging culture that blatantly disregards laws that would otherwise seek to protect their very profession. I guess I play it so fucking straight I kind of expect most people to be on the same page. I expect even the abusers to at least understand what they're abusing, why they're abusing it, and the ramification of such actions.

The tube sites know damn well what they're doing. They can at least lend some explanation to their strategy.

I mean... I've done some things in my day, but I can't say I didn't know what I was doing.

But this... this is just crazy IMO. It's like ignorance gone wild. It's like they're in their own little bubble, their own little self-righteous circle-jerk content-theft universe.

But thanks for shedding some light on the subject...

ya you seem clueless.

Online users should have to post their job next to their username on blogs and forums. Then we could show up at their place of work and fuck things up for them. I doubt they would like that, assuming they have a job.

Speaking of posting images that people don't own...

http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/8...1474webnv3.jpg

They're just patsies, some guy on a blogging freehost posts your stuff, it's rapidshare and the blog network who are profiting.

It's important to understand it's not a profession to most of these people. Most of them don't have any hope, prayer, interest, or expectation of ever making a dime; a few of them have ads and affiliate links and think they might get rich someday, but no comprehension of the traffic scale required before they'll be able to quit their day job. For most, it's a hobby or something they do "for visibility" or "just for fun".

Also important to be clear: this is not ignorance for the most part. They know there is a thing called copyright, they just reject it, as incompatible with their values and needs. For the most part, they genuinely believe the part where you're a stupid-head if you put something on the internet without the expectation that it will be widely recopied and shared. (Looking at things objectively, they have a point about that one -- content owners hate it, but the fact of such copying is objectively true, and acting surprised and butthurt about it makes rights-holders look dimwitted at best.)

But it's the sense of outraged discovery in your post that made my jaw drop and still has it on the ground: compared to, say, the adult business, theirs is not a "little bubble" or a "little universe". Their subculture, measured by number of websites or by souls who believe in their ethics and bedamned to the law, is huge.

In fact, the blogging culture is so big -- and the amount of traffic it has at its fingertips is so large, although dwindling these days, as social networks wax and blogs wane -- that lots of adult webmasters and programs have been working with it successfully for a long time. This has upsides and downsides, and the fact that they will never respect intellectual property in a corporate way is -- from a corporate perspective -- definitely a downside. But it's totally not news.

And now, I think I am going to go start a thread about how astonished I am to discover pictures of overflowing toilets on 4chan. :winkwink:

It sounds like a storm in a tea cup.
:2 cents:

C'mon guys, just because this is GFY, you don't need to be total dicks about this. Everybody discovers things on their own schedule.

Thanks for enlightening me about the blogging culture :) It was a good read.

there is no such thing as 'blogger culture', its just some bullshit excuse losers use. sure maybe a few losers who are too stupid to realize they could be making money instead of just wasting their time out there but i can't say i've come across many blogs in my life that didn't at least have google ads on it...its funny you say 'its the cost of doing business' but say they aren't doing it for money so how is it business then? you also say most don't get any traffic then say there is so much traffic in the 'blogger culture'. you seem to be contradicting yourself.

Apparently the psycho who's blog I linked to is reading her referrer logs :) Then she deleted my well-written comment, and blocked me from commenting. Sweet...

Not really sure what that means.

Wow, were you an ostrich in another life?

there is no more 'blogger culture' than there would be website culture or tube culture or whatever you want to toss out there. why does a bunch of people doing it make it a 'culture'? because some lame ass decided to call it that?:1orglaugh

You're welcome -- I know I can come on a little strong but this is GFY, we are all big kids. :thumbsup

I've actually made a pretty good living for a lot of years working the interface between the porn business and the blogging culture. You just have to know the local customs on both sides.

You are wrong. And you are impervious to data, much of which has already been presented to you. So there's no point in trying to educate you further. Thus: :321GFY

i just don't get why its called a culture. is this some vain attempt to legitimize it? it would seem so. a large group of people who break laws and think its ok because its their 'culture'..damn i should start a bank robber culture. don't blame us...its the culture!

this thread sucks

Hey thanx for the info.


Was a good read and i really learned something new.:thumbsup

I believe you are missing the point of the discussion. This is an attempt at description, not justification.

The internet is full of cultures and subcultures. There's a gamer culture on the internet, a sports culture, a warez-trading culture, a slash-fanfic writing culture, a BDSM culture, and a million more. Each of these cultures has their own forums, sites, blogs, morals, beliefs, slang, t-shirts, conventions that they go to -- hell, often you can tell which internet culture somebody is in just by looking at the abbreviations they use in their text messages. The slang is distinctive in many cases, sometimes so much so that it's like a unique dialect or language.

These are cultures in exactly the same sense that sociologists study the 2000 different cultures of headhunters in New Guinea -- people organized by common beliefs, ideas, language, behavior, and tradition. To deny the existence of cultural identity among these groups is just ignorant.

Now, on the internet and in the real world, there's a huge political fight about whether we ought to respect all cultures, or whether it's perfectly fine to say "this culture is civilized and great, whereas that culture is barbaric, uncivilized, and full of losers who deserve what's about to happen to them when they get bulldozed by history." You, BlackCrayon, seem to think that fight is over, and that just by labeling something a culture, it's automatically entitled to respect. (And so you're balking at the stage where we label something as a culture.) I don't agree -- on the internet or in the real world -- and I never made that argument.

But the cultural reality of internet groupings is real. And it won't go away just because you happen to despise one of those cultures, no matter how good your reasons for doing so might be.

There are a few "bloggers" here on GFY that do this shit.

I was about to recommend an enlightening book on the subject but I'd rather leave you all in the dark...

Its just the word you use, culture. I've never heard of these referred to as such and it seems that just by using that word, you are attempting to justify what they are doing despite you saying you are not. What you are calling a culture, I would call a niche...

Well, you need to get out more. You seriously never heard of "gamer culture" or "the hacker subculture"?

Culture is a word that means what I'm using it for.

i noticed some nice traffic from tumblr.com actually, people were pulling (not hotlinking) the pics from one of my blogs and linked directly to that blog post which had my affiliate code.

( I understand that this isn't your point of view and your not defending this...)

But that is dumbest thing I've ever read.

Cable TV is for showing TV and movies, but laws still apply. They can't play a TV or movie unless they have rights to do so.

The Internet isn't for "sharing anyone's information", it's for "sharing your information" or "information you have the legal right to share". Not just slapping anyone's information or photos without permission.

Anyone who believes that is just plain stupid already.

no kidding, a quick peak right now shows the owners of the following sites online right now. shooshtime, phun, planetsuzy, kaktuz. amongst others i don't recognize...

If the blogger is just using one pic with a backlink then i cannot see the problem, it sounds like a good trade-off for a backlink but any more content than that is theft, so what if bloggers think you'll be a dick-head if you complain - be a dick head!

But ..
Culture? nah, a group of people who use blogging scripts are called a culture? I don't think so, is there an arcade script culture or a forum owners culture? No, there isn't.

uh yes there is ....

this thread is dumb btw.

Some of you have been completely blinded by the commercial aspect of the internet. There is a huge non-profit portion of the 'blogosphere' with consistently active bloggers rambling on about any number of topics. They have small dedicated followings who congregate in little circles. They aren't concerned with number sof viewers or marketing anything, and there a millions of these people. From grandmas blogging and knitting dog sweaters, to skiers blogging about powder days, and collectors rambling on about their latest addition to their stamp collection. Whether or not you want to refer to this as a 'culture' is a null point. You're arguing nothing on both sides...

Rochard, that is indeed what gets interesting about comparative cultural studies. If you want to get judgmental about other cultures, you can ... but a lot of times, it makes you blind to what the people who have those other cultural views are likely to do. And that's deadly if you are competing with them or trying to influence them. So even if you think they are stupid or depraved, a lot of times it makes sense to try to understand how they think or where they are coming from.

And anyway, the blogging culture doesn't see the internet as a tool for sharing "other people's" information; they just have a sort of pragmatic understanding that once a thing has been posted anywhere on the web, it is liable to be copied, it in fact already has been copied by numerous other somebodies, and whatever the law says about that or the owner thinks, you can't unring that bell or gather up that spilt milk.

Two things follow logically from that, to the blogger way of thinking.

1) If you don't want your shit copied, you ought to keep it on your hard drive. Only an idiot puts something on the web and expects that it won't be copied all over the place. (This is not an objectively stupid observation; it's true in fact, whatever the law says.)

2) In light of #1, the blogger therefore assumes that if a thing has been posted to the web, the person doing the posting is inviting it to be be copied. I'll express an editorial comment on this one; it's nerd logic. If #1 is true, #2 ought to be true; the fact that it isn't true is a bafflement to logical nerds everywhere.

Thus it's not quite right to say that people inhabiting this meme-structure view the internet as a device for sharing other people's information. By their lights, the "other people" already shared it when they published it in the first place. And everything that follows, in this meme-structure, happens by natural law and as a consequence of the way the internet works; people like the ones in this this thread who are angry with the results are just so many King Canutes standing in the surf trying foolishly to command the tides.

To anybody with a lot invested in the old-school concepts of intellectual property law, it's a bizarre and destructive worldview that creates an enormous amount of angst, anger, and terror. I get that; I even share some of it. Hell, it's directly responsible for killing a huge chunk of my annual income in recent years, so of course I'm not defending it.

But it's still a reality. Tens of millions of people think like this.

And I'm not convinced that "dumb" is a reasonable adjective to apply to it. As meme structures go, it currently appears to be out-competing ours. A huge part of why blogger culture ignores intellectual property law is that to them and to many allied internet cultures with "sharing" mentalities, IP law appears ancient, obsolete, irrelevant, clueless, and out of touch with reality. And by ignoring it, they are quite cheerfully killing the economic structures that it supports. (That would include many of our businesses.)

Is that a good thing? Not for us, certainly. But if we want to survive, we have to understand and adapt, not just point and laugh and call "dumb" the memes that are destroying us.

The old military adage is: "If it's stupid and it works...it isn't stupid."

Y'all just keep pointing and laughing and calling names. Keep your head in the sand and pretend these people don't exist, or are too stupid or dumb to matter.

Let me know how that works out for ya, long run. :)

porn is a cultural ghetto.

Well, it's sure as fuck an anti-intellectual one...

I don't know if anti-intellectual si the right term, maybe pseudo-intellectual lol... :thumbsup

He must be banking like a mofo for all his Tesla swag.

the thing about these 'cultures' is that they can be anything they want, make up the rules as they go along to please whatever they want to do. they're just a bunch of entitlement geeks. who would they be without other peoples shit to steal? nothing, nobody.

Cultures are not constrained from without except by force. Yes; that's pretty much axiomatic.

Plus you don't like this one. We got that already.

Reminds me a little of the youtube users who include in their description something like, "this is not my video, no infringement is intended." Yeah, I know I'm breaking the law, but if I admit it then maybe they won't delete it! :D