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Reblogging from the artist's side

Stashed in: User Generated Content, Tech biz, The Web, @timberners_lee, Copying, Arts

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Great first-person discussion of the original content creator's POV in the reblogging debate:

http://krisstraub.com/2011/11/24/more-on-attribution/

I agree with Kris that the joy shouldn't be attached to being the CREATOR of content but rather the ONE TO SHARE it with friends and followers:

As a reblogger of existing content, there’s a little joy or pride one would take in being the one to break a new popular thing. That must feel good.

The bad thing about Reblogging and some forms of Retweeting and Repinning is that some people in the post-Creative Commons generation favor no attribution over attribution.

Some members of the Reblog Generation don't understand what Plagiarism is -- or think it only applies to educational situations.

The original inventors of hypertext had a concept called Transclusion that always included links to the origins of content.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim-Berners Lee, had this to say about Transclusion and its inventor Ted Nelson:

In Ted's vision, every quotation would have been a link back to its source, allowing original authors to be compensated by a very small amount each time the quotation was read. He had the dream of a utopian society in which all information could be shared among people who communicated as equals. He struggled for years to find funding for his project, but success eluded him.

The Web broke transclusion, which allowed the benefits of Internet scale due to massive decentralization: content was copied instead of included with a link back to origin.

The sins of Reblogging are the sins of the Web itself: it's the person who reblogs that decides whether to commit plagiarism, not the tools the person uses.

Kudos to Chainsaw Suit for pointing out the cavalier non-attributing attitude of some rebloggers.

Amusingly to me, the example in the article, "No one gets mad and demands to be credited for widespread memes and jokes like trollface", is almost a perfect counter example.

Somebody claiming to be the creator did indeed.

http://www.yalelawtech.org/fair-use-of-the-week/fair-use-of-the-week-trollface/

Despite it's Yale like rigor, that article does not attempt to answer the important question, was that the creator trolling, the creator being serious, or a third party trolling? I'm guessing there was some trolling going on, but I'm to lazy to check how it played out.

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