“If it’s on the internet, I can just use it without saying where I got it, right?”

This is one of the banes of my professional existence. Someone else wrote those words, took that photo, drew that picture. Why on earth do you think it’s OK to present it as yours?

On my better days, I assume people are stupid and just don’t know any better. On my more cynical days, I assume they took Tom Lehrer’s (public domain) lryics to heart:

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics
Plagiarize
Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “Research”

This is one area where I am a red-blooded ‘Murican. I am a big proponent of ownership. I made it, I own it, I should be able to do what I want with it. (Unless it’s my kid. His entire life, I have had no idea what to do with him half the time.) If I sew a tapestry, it’s mine to sell or keep or destroy or reproduce as I see fit. And if I post a photo of it on the internet, that photo is also mine unless I forfeit rights to it. How hard is this?

Obviously, legal limits should apply, and living things are harder to parse. People own dogs, but that “whatever I want to do with it” part has limits; I’m not going to defend someone’s right to leave a critter in a concrete kennel with no water til it dies.

Ownership is also at the root of many thought exercises I indulge in (and get nowhere) regarding AI. If you slap a CGI Carrie Fisher in a new movie, is it identity theft? If you plug in all Shakespeare’s sonnets and ask ChatGPT for an ode to Cheez-Its, is the result an original creation or is it intellectual appropriation? And is the owner of the ode the person who asked for it to be written or the machine that wrote it?

But in short, y’all, come on. Give credit where it’s due.