GeekVariety

I’ve already sent this person a message telling them why they are wrong, now I want to expand on this a little further to the general audience.

The comment left with the reblog of this post was “so does tumblr m8”, to which I say “WRONG WRONG WRONG, NO NO NO AND HELL NO!”

What happens at tumblr is kids (mostly) post neat things they find other places on the internet. Most of them aren’t concerned about attribution cause they don’t think about it like that. To them the internet is a free lunch and they can take things just by right clicking their mouse and hitting save image. There is no thought about, hey this is neat and getting lots of traffic at another site so let me steal it, put our watermark on it and basically claim it as our own material so we can make money off it.

WHAT 9GAG IS DOING:

- Removing artist watermarks.
- Purposely deleting artist names.
- Plagiarism.
- Idea theft.
- Cropping art of any and all identifying markings.
- Putting their own watermark on things like this is some fucking new country and they claimed ownership by doing so like they planted a flag on the North Pole!

…and the list goes on and on and on.

So what is so different about these things when we speak about 9GAG as apposed to people doing them on tumblr? 9GAG is profiting from this! They are stealing others works and making money off of it. They have just signed a million dollar deal for seed money to expand their theft ring. They are publishing others works with ads on pages that create revenue of which the artist will never see a dime. They are essentially in the same boat as Kim Dotcom was with Megaupload but they have corporate backing and are expanding while he sits in jail!

What happens on tumblr is people post pretty pictures and delete all that boring text so it doesn’t make their blog look bad and aren’t making a fucking cent while doing it.

So essentially what you’ve created with your words is a false equivalence.