An internet friend of mine notified me today that a recording (of the “Babel Text”) and a picture (of the text of Conlang Relay 15) from this website was reposted on Youtube without any indication of source. And it’s been sitting there for about half a year already. Of course, I could have gone mad and reported it as a copyright violation immediately, since according to the terms of use of this site, all contents are copyrighted by me as far as not indicated otherwise, and reposting content you did not create yourself without consent is also against Youtube’s terms of trade. However, I find it silly to slap a watermark on anything I put up here. After all, I’m not making any money from this, it’s just a thing I do as a hobby. Still, I put work into things, and I’m grateful if people acknowledge this by stating who made it.

As far as content on the internet goes, I believe it’s an illusion to keep 100% control of how and by whom your content is used, since – as I see it – it is in the nature of the internet for content to get reposted elsewhere, even without your expressed consent, sooner or later. Viral campaigns essentially build on this behavior, as far as I know. This is by no means meant to be an invitation to ripping me off, however! My reply to said video:

Hi, I’m the creator of Ayeri and I was just notified by a friend you put this up here. While it’s nice to see that people like my stuff and while it’s clear to me that things one puts online are likely to end up elsewhere sooner or later, you could’ve easily dropped me a line, or at lease given credit. I’m not gonna have this removed, but please at least state your source.

I’m usually not against people using my things as long as they ask. I mean, if content you made gets reposted – that is, shared – by others, so that people who follow them are made aware of your work’s existence, that’s certainly nice, in and of itself. Everyone likes recommendations, and a large part of the internet builds on recommendations these days. And judging from other videos posted by the user, this is also what happened in my case: reposting what you appreciate or find interesting. However, what I’m allergic against is not giving credit. I don’t care too much about sharing the media I publish on Ayeri, however, I think it should still be a generally accepted habit to state the original source if you repost content for the purpose of sharing it with others. It’s egotist not to do so, and not very “Web 2.0” either in my opinion, as recommendations usually include giving the original source so that other people can find more interesting things there.

A positive surprise when reading the comments to the video was, however, that some people actually recognized this as Ayeri, that is, they did not mistake it as the poster’s creation. I’m curious how this will turn out.