Yes, there is too such a thing as copyright on the internet

[astridv]

I was browsing the most recent RPF tinhatter wanks in SPN and One Direction fandom but I barely found it in me to roll my eyes at the crazy. Well, okay, I did. But what really did it was this tangential statement (in the comments at the second link): It's the internet and there's no copyright on Tumblrs. Once you put it out there, it's out there and no one needs any permission to repost anything you've written or created.

WRONG. OMG so extremely wrong. Not that I don't think this is a prevalent view but that doesn't make it better. One quick look at tumblr's TOS confirms:
Ownership:
Subscribers retain ownership of all intellectual property rights in their Subscriber Content, and Tumblr and/or third parties retain ownership of all intellectual property rights in all Content other than Subscriber Content.
You retain ownership of any intellectual property you post to Tumblr.

What you do when you sign up is give a non-exclusive license for others to reblog your content. On tumblr. (See "Subscriber Content License to Tumblr".) You still retain the copyright to your work. (And reblogging content from outside tumblr is in many cases copyright infringement but that's a slightly different matter.)

I'm ignoring fair use exceptions here. The important thing is: internet does not equal public domain.
Man, I feel like I should write that last in all-caps and bold, with sparkles.

Comments

[ratcreature]

It's the internet and there's no copyright on Tumblrs. Once you put it out there, it's out there and no one needs any permission to repost anything you've written or created.

*headdesks forever*

[astridv]

I knoooow.
Let me see if I have a proper icon to convey my feelings on the matter...
alas, I don't.

[ratcreature]

I kind of feel like this, when I see my art uploaded all over the place. I mean, when I do a reverse image search for my more popular art, I sometimes find some pictures uploaded in more than a dozen places where I did not put them, and that is despite not being a particularly popular artist. Half the time people don't even link back, and I've had it happen that they cut off sigs too.

[astridv]

How do you do a reverse image search?
I'm not even sure I want to know... I'm annoyed enough at the stuff that gets taken and credited. But if I were to find more than a few uncredited pics I'd consider adding a signature watermark to any new pieces. (And hope that people wouldn't go to the extra trouble of cutting it off. What the hell.)

[ratcreature]

The instance with the cutting off used a Batman/Robin slash sketch I made in some sort of picture contest on an official DC comic artists site (they didn't just use ma picture but pasted it into some other context, iirc, I think it was a caption kind of thing or something, it's been a while). I only found out because someone on my flist who also hung out on that message board told be about it.

For a reverse image search you go to google, then to the image search, and then in the text box there is this little camera icon on the right side. If you click that, there is a pop-up, where you can either enter an URL or upload an image from your hard disk, and then google searches for that image and shows you all the places it has been posted, also different sizes and such. Other search engines do the same.

Ever since that has become available I don't buy people's excuses that "they didn't know the artist" when they just repost without credit. In 90% of the cases when I come across uncredited art, and want to find out where they got it from a one click search gives me the source, though sometimes the original place is quite buried among the copies.

[astridv]

Thanks, I check it out.

Ever since that has become available I don't buy people's excuses that "they didn't know the artist".

In their defense, I didn't know either. However it's still not a really good excuse - they could just post a thumbnail and link to the piece where they found it. Or post only a link, if they don't know how to make a thumb.

[ratcreature]

I found slash art gets copied and randomly posted far more than gen, so that works in your favor. About half seems to be into posts/message boards that mock slash or find it icky or whatever (or use it for picture commentary, I once got an huge traffic spike when someone put one of my pictures in a comment ONTD post), and those often obviously don't care for proper sourcing. I assume that then later on people who like slash come across pictures they like in those places, and obviously it makes no sense to link to there, but they don't bother to do a search.

In the case of my art, nobody even needs image search, because even before I started to watermark with my URL I signed almost everything except some doodles, with "RatCreature", and my online locations make up eight of the ten first google results for that, including the first three, before even any Bone related stuff which is the comic where I got my pseud from.