Pirates

Lately I have noticed more and more pirating of artwork, cartoons, quotes, poetry and ideas via the internet.  Primarily, Facebook is the conduit although e mail and Tweets also have become guilty conspirators in the act of piracy.

I got angry about a month ago when it happened to me.  My blog theme was blatantly copied during a ‘contest’ of blogs and the person did not give me acknowledgement.  She said she had gotten the idea from a blog but did not give me credit.  This was extremely annoying to me and I dropped out of the ‘contest.’  I mean, after all, there are thousands of ideas and experiences to write about and I see no reason someone can’t come up with their own idea from their own life.

But even more recently I have started seeing original artworks, cartoons, and photographs being pirated.  The copywrite and/or name of the original artist is being removed and the name of another person is being applied.  One particular photographer tracked down the person that stole his work and asked Facebook to remove the stolen photograph.  Facebook responded by blocking the victim from using messaging.  They refused to block the stolen photograph from being circulated.  The lack of ethics by Facebook and by many of its users is appalling.

Over the past 5-10 years there have been many stories written in the press about plagiarism.  These deal primarily with high school and college students using the works of other students or professional writers and submitting the works under their own names in order to avoid having to do the research and writing themselves.  Some politicians have also been found guilty of this.  It seems to be less of a concern amongst the general public and the overall ethics in this area is degrading.

I’m not sure how we can address the problem.  When I saw one of the Off the Mark cartoons recently being circulated under another name, I really got concerned.  It happened to be a cartoon with two chickens.  Didn’t chicken theft used to be a crime punishable by death?