On Stealing & Other Douchebaggery

I feel like this is a topic that I specifically need to address, given that several of my friends have recently been subjected to severe bouts of internet plagiarism. And when I say severe, I mean that entire blogs, collections of poetry, and photo galleries have been ripped, copied, and passed off as another individual's work.

This is very, very uncool.

Let me make a few things clear:

1. I believe in a Creative Commons share and share alike approach to all intellectual property on the internet. If you want to source my writing or my photographs with attribution, that's perfectly fine by me. In fact, my narcissistic self gets a kick out of seeing my number of Google hits increase (yeah, yeah, I egosurf -- sue me), so attribute away.

2. I strongly feel that anyone who doesn't want any of his or her images or ideas reproduced at all should just keep all such work offline, because honestly -- you're asking a little much of several billion people not to pass around your nonsense if you're sticking it up on the aptly-named World Wide Web.

3. To that end, I don't go to any great lengths to protect my images. They're up on the internet, they're easily saved (can anyone explain to me why people try so hard to prevent others from right click + saving images when there's this handy little tool called a screenshot?!), and they'd be, in theory, very easy to steal.

4. But. If I ever, EVER catch anyone trying to plagiarize my work, the shit will hit the proverbial fan. Even worse -- and this actually happened to someone I know recently -- try to sell my work, and I will come after you with a baseball bat.

So, you know. Don't say I didn't give you fair warning.