The Recent Plagiarisms
Interesting (to me) that these are all visual (and Flickr-based) plagiarisms. Kind of an indicator of about where the web is heading, right?
Having your work [read: your writing, since that was the primary game in town at that point] stolen was a concern for a lot of people back in the early days of the interweb. I remember people expressing disbelief or bewilderment that I would post stories on the Internet, where anyone could take them and claim them as their own, presumably riding them off into the sunset of fame and literary fortune. And it did ocasionally happen; I remember Josh brow-beating some guy on the Fireland forums (!) who had appropriated some J. Allen classics and presented them as his own. Some say Josh was never the same after that night.
Now of course that’s not much of a concern—Google has your writing indexed and cataloged 15 minutes after you post it. They’ve become the de facto arbiters of copyright, with an ease and efficiency that government-sponsored copyrighting never achieved.
But who cares, there’s no financial incentive to steal anything written on the web. Visual art is the way of the future. $1 says it’s someone’s job at Flickr to solve this problem.
See also: Qwantz.
