Author: William Lise

Plagiarism and Content that Never Will Be

Until recently, I was working on a comprehensive directory of the etymologies of hundreds of (682, to be precise) names given to warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Silly me, I had even toyed with the idea of making that content accessible on a corner of my website.

I have suspended all efforts to create that content, for a good reason.

Several times I had an article on my old website discussing the conventions used in naming of IJN ships.

I recently discovered (for the nth time, actually, where n is an angering integer) that significant portions of that article have been included verbatim and put into a Wikipedia page discussing IJN ship naming conventions, written by an anonymous author, of course, and without any credit given to the original content or permission from me to use the content as a significant part of the article.

To set the record straight, I had restored that article to a corner of my website that houses such non-business content as demonstration of what was stolen, but have now even removed that, as it would likely just bring more theft, including clueless claims that it was “public domain” because it was publically accessible.

We live in a world in which criminals get away with crime because they have been given anonymity by the tech bros claiming to create a wonderful world by connecting people. I say lock the criminal tech bros up and take back intellectual property rights they have made super-easy to infringe.

The Internet is awash with stolen and criminal content. Billionaires claiming to have a mission to connect people partner with outright criminals, including, for example, Chinese criminals on Facebook using what appear to be AI-generated photos of whores, who might turn out to be thugs in Kosovo. Such garbage has become the norm.

But not to worry. If you install an ad blocker, you can pretend you don’t know that it’s happening. But it’s still happening.

Returning to the plagiarism, it could be that many people don’t realize that stealing and republishing content without permission and with no credit given is a crime. Why? Because you can get away with it, so it must not be a crime, right? Anonymity is the friend of criminals.

Weeks ago I asked on an IJN-related Facebook group if anyone knows who created or manages the offending Wikipedia page, but I don’t have much hope of getting a useful answer, and that lack of hope has turned out to be justified. Information wants to be stolen, right? I suspect it is a member of that group who took and republished the content.

Not surprisingly, in the above-noted Facebook group, there is virutally no original content, most members concentrating on scanning and uploading photos from published books. Such is the nature of much of social media.

Some Thoughts on Content Creation and Theft

I’ve never been fond of the term “content creator”, basically because it’s thrown around by large numbers of people who have nothing to say, other than that they want to be thought of as content creators. That self-applied term is as meaningless as things like start-up (which has become a meaningless buzzword in Japanese as well), entrepreneur, solopreneur, and a diverse spectrum of other popular buzzwords. Anyone can call themselves a content creator, and that has led to a serious devaluing of the term.

But for people who actually create content or have likenesses they wish to protect the rights to, the Internet—and social media in particular—has simply enabled theft thereof without consequences, including theft of material purportedly protected by laws.

Anything you create and dare to put online can be unlawfully published and used to make profit, and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it that will have any effect, unless you are a large corporation with a team of attorneys, and even those entities are plagued by pirating and unlawful publishing.

The provenance of most of the content uploaded to social media is unknown and undisclosed, not that disclosing the provenance grants publishing rights; it does not. Since a lot of that content it is the result of a multiple unlawful publishing, an unlawful republisher very likely doesn’t even know who owns the content they have unflawfully republished. The proliferation of “Where is that?” questions about photos and the annoyance of some thieves with those questions is evidence of this situation. The unlawful republisher often does not know from where an impressive photo was taken.

Anonymity and the social media business models that rely on providing and protecting user and advertiser anonymity have rendered legal remedies meaningless, even if they were economically feasible, which they seldom are.

This is demonstrated by the countless anonymous page posts on Facebook. Zuckerberg is certainly not interested in stopping these posts, because they provoke engagement, and engagement gives him and his company more money and increased power to capture the attention—and manipulate the behavior—of what are now billions of users.

The game has been won by the tech giants, and it looks like nobody is willing to stop them. People who remain silent are guilty of contributory negligence and act as accomplices, although apparently many haven’t a clue as to what’s going on.

Jaron Lanier was right.