Riding Coattails

"What's mine is your's and what's your's is mine."
- Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare 1603/4

Memes on Facebook run rampant. With the "Share" feature on wall posts, users of Facebook can share links from one person to their networks.

I have shared YouTube videos of cute marmots, kittens taking showers, the latest music videos, news articles - anything that I think would be interesting to my diverse group of friends on Facebook. And I have been inspired by many of my friend's posts and links as well.

Now the dark side of sharing has appeared. I first noticed this last week, a popular site 27bslash6 by David Thorne put up a series of emails that went back and forth about a Missing Cat. A dry sense of humor spiked with the urgency of a missing cat had me rolling on the floor (well, not literally but in my mind I was rolling all over the floor). A few days after seeing David Thorne's site shared on Facebook, I noticed the same article with a different link. The link went to a Taiwanese bike site. What that Taiwanese site had done was copy verbatim the entire article and posted it on their site, and was now getting hits, diverting hits to the proper owner of the article.

In my bad cop way, I informed the people posting the bad link that it was not the official site and that it was a parasite site. One person corrected the link, the other really didn't get that it was wholesale piracy of another person's work. There are times when I feel like I am spitting in the wind when it comes to educating people that piracy affects all of us, especially the artist.

Are we going to see more of this? Yes. Facebook and other social networking sites highlight the most popular links and from this, any site can then copy and paste the site to their ride the coattails. The only way to stop this is to validate the link and to properly attribute the artist and not the pirate. Content is free to view, but should never be free to steal.

Image: Ophelia Chong /Dave & Sandy