A while ago, a friend discovered my Are You Burnt Out PSA had been shared by a Facebook page with 31,000 likes. That post was shared by another 500+ folks after that. I’m truly and honestly flattered that so many folks would share my joke.
There was only one problem: the original poster had removed my logo from the PSA.
In truth, I’m kinda bummed those folks who saw the logo-less version won’t get to connect with me.
See, I make these PSAs for you as much as I make them for me. I like to know that other people out there feel the same way, too. It’s like a little high-five for my soul each time someone shares, likes, or comments on one of my PSAs.
I make like… $1 for every coffee mug or t-shirt sold, which is not a ton, right? So removing my logo doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if someone planned to resell it. And, it’s not like removing my logo from that particular PSA made it easier to share or cleaned it up any (there’s still the stick figures having sex and all…)
So it got me thinking…
There’s a bell curve of intelligence, right?
Stephen Hawking and Einstein and those guys? They’re way over there on the right. People like you and me? We’re right around the center (no offense, I’m only guessing here). George Carlin liked to say, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I do pretty idiotic things. Like this morning, I’m pretty sure I answered the door in my boxers. It’s a moving measurement from day to day, I suppose. So when I wonder why someone would take my logo off of one of my PSAs, I can only think it’s because they’re too far down the curve (in that moment or possibly about digital rights in general) to know any better.
Friday, my friend Erika had this happen to her, too. Her “Buy Me Coffee” consulting offer was stolen not once, not twice, but three times since she put it up in February. In typical Redhead Writing style, she went for a scorched Earth policy in calling out the first infringer. I’ll be honest: I had a hard time figuring out at first how the infringer Erika called out had, well, infringed.
When I looked at Erika’s screenshots, side-by-side, of her offer and the infringer’s offer – I saw two different pieces of content. My understanding was that in order to infringe on someone’s copyright, you actually had to copy the original content to some degree. From what I saw, under that understanding, it wasn’t infringement because the copy had been changed “enough” in my opinion to make it a different bit of content.
Meanwhile a few trolls who had found Erika’s post began to pick apart the infringer with ad-hominem attacks on the infringer’s gender, age, and choice of career – anything and everything they could to demean and degrade the infringer. Something I find totally distasteful. True, the infringer could have known better – or they might not have. In either case, ad-hominem attacks aren’t the right way to prove a point. To do so in blog comments is like a digital community form of slut shaming.
UPDATE: Erika posted a follow-up “On Stealing Shit”, which is well worth your time to read.
What ends up happening with ad-hominem attacks: the infringer becomes even more entrenched in their existing misconceptions and increasingly unlikely to do anything when contacted for fear of getting personally blasted for a (potentially innocent – if you thought that plagiarism stops at changing the copy) mistake. See the problem?
If your definition of “enough” determines whether or not you’ve plagiarized, your reaction (and awareness of if you did anything wrong) will be based entirely on your intentions and your understanding of where that “plagiarism” line is.
It wasn’t until Erika explained to me that the infringer had duplicated her execution of the idea that I really got it: while the copy (the written content) had changed, the other elements of the execution – the layout/design, the concept, and the systems (how the concept is done) – were copied nearly verbatim.
The “soul” of Erika’s idea was in the execution – the combination of the layout and design, the concept itself, the systems to implement the concept, and the copy and content. While the infringer had changed the copy and content, they hadn’t changed anything else – which is a form of piracy.
Think of it this way: you’d be pissed if someone stole your genetic code and cloned you, except they changed the tone of your skin, eyes, and hair and gave you a squeaky voice. The clone might look and sound different, but it’d still be “you”.
What became super clear to me is that people don’t need education in why it’s wrong to steal, but what exactly constitutes theft in the digital age. Only when all content creators begin teaching all of our readers what constitutes theft can we have any hope of preventing it from propagating itself.
The good majority of my content is (purposefully) licensed under Creative Commons – if someone is inspired by what I do, I want them to be able to adapt and grow it. So if someone “borrows” an idea from me, all they need to do is give me attribution. Under copyright, it’s a bit more complicated – even so, some education would be a welcome thing.
So – what do you want to know? What can I help you find out?
