Rachel Dukes posts her cartoons on the internet for free. She loves it when her cartoons are shared. But even an artist who gives her work away for free wants her name attached to her work. Dukes posted a cat cartoon in January that circulated around the internet at a pretty healthy clip. However, the cartoon didn't really take off until some 9Gag user clipped the URL and credit information from the bottom of the cartoon and published it as their own work. Dukes provides a tally of how far the cartoon made it around the net, in both credited and uncredited versions:
Posts using the credited image:
2,912 votes
2,721 Tumblr notes
50,535 views
727 Tweets
0 Pintrest shares
14,000 Facebook likes
10,700 Facebook sharesPosts using the uncredited image:
29,629 votes
62,393 Tumblr notes
140,219 views
0 Tweets
6,000 Pintrest shares
2,085 Facebook likes
347,984 Facebook shares
This is, obviously, crazy. Dukes is asking for no payment other than her own name attached to her own work; most of the internet can't even be bothered to allow her that one simple request. Why has the uncredited version traveled so much further than the credited version? Is it that people just like to claim others' work as their own? Or is it somehow subconsciously easier for people to "share" work online when there's no obvious authorship attached? Now that Google makes it ridiculously easy to do a reverse image search, there's no reason for sites like BuzzFeed and Cheezburger to get away with these kinds of shenanigans. But they still do it. Boy, do they ever do it.
(The Lost in Font blog on Tumblr deserves credit for getting this post in front of my eyes.)
