What I have to write and talk about is rarely earthshaking. Most of it should be quite ho-hum common sense, although an argument could be made that common sense has become less common these days.
That said, the widespread theft and unlawful unauthorized use by AI users of content not belonging to the providers or the users of the AI provide a strong argument for just ceasing to contribute anything in public.
This is particularly true when so many people confuse public with the term of art public domain. That conveniently self-serving confusion started with the appearance of the Internet, became a much more serious problem with the appearance of social media, and has been aggravated by the essentially guaranteed anonymity of offenders.
Making something publicly accessible is not the same as placing it in public domain. Everything you write or create has a copyright, and you, the creator, own the copyright from the time of its creation. Neither registration nor publishing in print or commercial broadcast media is necessary.
With the exception of what is termed “fair use,” using that material or publishing it without permission is unlawful in many first-world legal jurisdictions. Publishing such stolen content as the overwhelming portion of a single post or other form of publishing is very rarely defensible as or judged to be fair use.
That makes the posts of a great portion of things to social media unlawful. Does anybody care? Probably not at this point. People have apparently given up.
Still, people who think they might have something to create that could be useful to others might think twice about putting it in public.
As a surely insignificant contribution to my own continuing program of removing content from public venues, a few months ago I deleted the documentation of seven substantial presentations I made at translation conferences over the years, the last one being in 2019 in Cairns. The organization that operated the conferences had already removed or lost that content from its website and, considering the current situation in both that organization and the translation business as a whole, it is highly unlikely they will find or restore that content.
If I write anything going forward, it will likely either be immutably linked to me and my own personal activities—that greatly lowers the chance of theft and reuse—or might be placed in a venue that is not publicly available to people I might not know or trust.
As a historical sidenote, some years back, I had two full website pages stolen verbatim by a translation broker in China. Repeated cease and desist notices were ignored, of course, because the thief had the “China” advantage. A similar advantage is enjoyed by many people who do not reveal their locations or true identities in cyberspace.
