thefrogman:

I got a message today saying that I was reblogging stolen gifs. I was told the people I reblog from are thieves and I shouldn’t reblog from them anymore. This might be true some of the time, but it is very hard to determine that. It’s more likely they found the content somewhere else and did not know the origin.

I’ve been doing this a long time. I have learned that gifs spread with more virality than just about any other kind of content. They are saved into reaction folders, shared on picdump sites, in forums, in tumblr asks… they go everywhere. The more viral these gifs get, the further away from the source they get. If you make popular gifs, you are going to see them other places without credit. At this point, google image search is just not very good at finding patient zero of a gif. Even if people want to credit you, it is very hard to track you down with current search technology. 

There are definitely villains in the sharing of gifs. There are people who will crop off watermarks and share the gifs as their own. I don’t condone that behavior. But the people who share the gifs after that point are not at fault. They did not know the gifs were altered and they probably just wanted to share something funny with their friends. Please do not accuse people of stealing until you have significant proof.  

There is also a false sense of ownership with gifs. Yes, you took the time and effort to convert that youtube video into a gif. And in a perfect world you should be acknowledged for that effort. If possible, I will most certainly do that. But this content is not yours. It belongs to the people who created the video. And those are the people I am most concerned with giving credit to. While it is incredibly difficult to find the source of who made a gif, it is a bit easier to track down the youtube video. And even if I cannot source the gif creator, I can drive a great deal of traffic to the video. That is an attribution win in my book. 

All that said… if you see a gif that you made on my blog, send me a message. (non-anonymously with a link!) I will either reblog it from you or add a credit to the post. If you see your gifs on other blogs, you should politely ask they do the same. Most of the time they were unaware it was your gif and are happy to add a credit.