There is no honor among thieves…
6 minute read
June 6, 2025, 9:00 AM
As some of you may know, I am a moderator on Reddit for a few retail-related subreddits, where people post news, photos, and other things related to retail. Recently, on /r/retailporn, this message came through from /u/dinosaurdracula:
Hi there, this user stole content from me and edited out my watermark.
Post in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/retailporn/comments/1l1av6y/walmart_snack_bar_advertisement_from_the_90s/
My original post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1266097082186444&set=pb.100063584912398.-2207520000&type=3
I spend a great deal of time and money finding these old catalogs — it’s a real pain when people want to karma-farm and can’t even be decent enough to credit. I’d appreciate it if you could remove this post. Thank you!
I fielded this one, and I sent the following message in response:
First of all, let me preface this by saying that I am familiar with your page on Facebook, as it occasionally comes through on my news feed.
However, I am not willing to grant your request to remove the post in question, for one reason: you do not own the rights to the content that you posted. I am not swayed by how much time, money, and effort that you expend to find these catalogs, because at the end of the day, you are the one posting content in violation of copyright and improperly placing your watermark on content that you do not own. I find the argument that you have given when requesting removal to be incredibly weak, i.e. that other people are stealing the content that you stole first, and then scrubbed the watermark that you shouldn’t have placed on it in the first place.
Put another way, I am willing to look the other way when someone posts vintage ads in violation of copyright for the nostalgia factor, but I am absolutely not letting you claim any exclusivity over content that you don’t own to begin with.
It takes a certain amount of brass to message a subreddit asking for stolen content to be taken down when you stole the content yourself, and your argument is that you stole it first, and are upset that the next user removed their watermark and didn’t give them any credit for it. I think that I was fair with my assessment of the situation, that they had no leg to stand on because they were not the copyright holder. If Walmart wants to pull the content, then I’ll happily talk to a representative from Walmart. However, for a fan page with no verifiable permission from the copyright holder, get out of here with that nonsense. You don’t have any right to display the content in the first place, and I’m not going to help you maintain some notion of exclusivity over content that you have no intellectual property claim to. Copyright infringement is still copyright infringement, and it doesn’t matter who posted the content, because none of them ever got permission from the copyright holder to run it in the first place. Copyright does not care if you were the first one to steal it or the fiftieth one to steal it. It’s still an infringement all the same. And a subsequent infringer owes nothing to the original infringer because it’s not like it’s their content to begin with. It is wrong to put your name on content that you did not create, and it’s laughable when you try to get upset when someone else removed your name from the content that you had no claim to in the first place. And I especially don’t care how much time and money you spent on collecting catalogs. That’s akin to the person whose only defense to a poor product is talking about how hard they worked on it. My usual response is that we’ve all worked very hard to get crappy results at some point or other in our lives. Hard work does not automatically mean good work.
The whole thing actually reminds me of the drama that used to happen on the old alt.tv.game-shows newsgroup back in the early 2000s. This was before Facebook or any other modern social media sites existed, so back then, if you liked a piece of content, the way that you showed your enjoyment of that content was to make a little fan website about the content. It was just what you did back then. In the case of game shows, people would make fansites about one or multiple game shows, and they all looked pretty typical of early Internet sites, with an overall crude look compared to what we’re accustomed to today. And they all had screenshots of various game shows on them, taken with the various video capture devices available at the time. That said, some of the users of alt.tv.game-shows would get upset when someone would use screenshots that someone else had captured on their fansites. I remember that a lot of this drama centered around a guy who went by the name “Vlankky” who created his own fansite like so many others, but pinched screenshots of game shows for his fansite from other people’s fansites rather than capturing his own, and gave no credit to the people who captured the screenshots. I don’t know what the reason was that he didn’t make his own screenshots, whether it was lack of equipment, lack of access to content, or simply unwillingness to make new screenshots, but that doesn’t really matter. The point is that Vlankky used screenshots that other people had captured previously, and that caused a lot of drama within the alt.tv.game-shows community.
Seeing all of this drama unfold way back in 2000 and 2001, I had to laugh a little bit about it, because it’s the exact same principle as with Dinosaur Dracula and the retail content: nobody involved in all of that drama held the copyright to the content that was being complained about, and nobody had verifiable permission from the rights holders, either. Therefore, nobody had any business getting butthurt over Vlankky’s using content from anyone else’s fansites, credited or otherwise, because technically, they stole it themselves. At most, they were trying to assert some level of superiority because they stole it first, but even that is laughable. Vlankky made a very good demonstration of the principle that there is no honor among thieves, as he pinched the screenshots from others’ fansites, i.e. the content that had been pre-stolen for him.
(Meanwhile, when most people on alt.tv.game-shows think of Vlankky – or “Spankky”, as some called him – the thing that will probably come to mind most readily was the time back in the summer of 2001 when he left a message on David Zinkin‘s voicemail that said, “Hello, it’s Spankky!” but that’s besides the point.)
This is also why I have the policy that I do when I need to use someone else’s content in a Journal entry or something under the principle of fair use. I feel that it is my responsibility to present that content absolutely clean, because it is not my place to put my name on content that I did not create.
And if someone uses any images that were not mine that I used on Schumin Web somewhere else, then so be it. That actually happened to me one time, way back in 2000 or so. Like so many of the other game show nuts back then, I also had a game show fansite (a site that has long since gone away). I captured a bunch of stills from some episodes of Wheel of Fortune, and this was one such instance:
Then the “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” flash animation came along, and at the 1:13 mark, this appears:
I saw that image and immediately recognized it as a screenshot from my game show fansite. It’s actually why “All Your Base” has special meaning to me, because they pulled a screenshot from my fansite. I laughed when I saw it, because I knew that I had no claim to the image, but felt kind of honored that they came by my little corner of the Internet to pull a screenshot for their animation. I was not contacted or credited, but since I didn’t own the image in the first place, it didn’t matter.
All of that said, the Internet proves the old saying that there is no honor among thieves to be quite true. If you didn’t create a piece of content and ran it on your page, you are not allowed to get upset when someone else takes it and runs it on their own page, and you especially don’t get to request its removal, because it was never yours to begin with. All you did was steal it first, which does not constitute any ownership claim.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Netculture, Reddit, Schumin Web meta
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