There is a growing trend of resignation to the unlawful online publishing of intellectual property by anonymous actors, without permission of the copyright holder.
People conveniently misunderstand public and downloadable as being public domain; it is not. And crediting the source does not make it lawful, particularly when the content unlawfully published in this manner constitutes the major part of a post to social media platforms or the like, which is usually the case.
Some people, usually anonymous or pseudonymous and not identifiable, have built their entire online presence by unlawfully publishing content without permission to do so from the owner.
On Zuckerberg’s stolen IP cesspool, Facebook, these thieves often position themselves as “digital creators.”
- They are not digital creators, but merely thieves.
- They, like their enablers, such as Mark Zuckerberg, demonstrate no socially redeeming value, and their posts almost never even reveal the name of the person with no socially redeeming value.
Although these criminal acts are most visible in the unlawful publishing of rather frivolous things like Gary Larson Fareside cartoons, the underlying notion that thievery must be accepted because you can’t stop it and there are no consequences for the thieves also underscores the risks anyone faces by publishing in public on the Internet.
I have had my business content stolen twice by Chinese thieves running translation brokers. They were anonymous and—because they were in China—unreachable by me. They ignored cease and desist notices.
The same type of content was also stolen once by someone here in Japan, but I was able to make them take down the material because I could identify them.
And one time a significant amount of content I wrote concerning the Imperial Japanese Navy was republished—without permission or crediting—as a Wikipedia page written by an unidentifiable thief.
All of this points to the strategy of simply not publishing anything of value in public, where it is available to unidentifiable and unknowable persons. This is something that I’m going to be giving some thought to in the coming days.