I Think I've Seen That Somewhere Before...

I remember the days of writing papers back in middle school, when I would go anywhere online and find any information relevant to my subject. No footnotes, no bibliography, just me throwing in information I had read as if it were my own.

But wait, isn't that illegal?

Of course it is, but at 12 years old, I didn't know that nor did my teachers really care.

The thing about copyright infringement is that it really doesn't matter unless the work you're producing is going to be read or seen by the person who holds the copyright. Obviously, no one other than my teacher was going to be reading my paper back in middle school. Even now, no one other than my teacher is going to read my 15-page paper that I spent days on. The only difference now is that teachers actually care. As they should.

But who is reading my blog? My teacher. Maybe a few of my classmates. There are millions upon millions of blogs on the Internet, only a small percentage of which are actually read by a large number of people. What's to stop all of these bloggers from stealing someone's work when no one is ever going to know?

This is the problem copyright owners face in the age of the Internet. If their work appears on a popular site, such as Yahoo or AOL, obviously they will find out. But if I go onto Google Images, find a sample of someone's photography and use it without credit, there's really nothing to stop me. Well, other than integrity.