Originally Posted by Forkbeard

Xenigo, I was being a little bit sarcastic because I assumed you actually did know about the blogging culture, but were pretending to be astonished by it.

Now I see by your second post that you really have just discovered it. Wow.

Those blogs you named aren't really part of the blogging culture per se; they are huge commercial bloglike webmagazines, part of a corporate network that has sprung up out of the blogging culture. But the corporate guys, for the most part, are respecters of copyrights, and thus not part of the blogging culture generally. The biggest reason they aren't blogs is that they don't share bloggers' attitudes toward intellectual property.

The larger blogging culture, which has been around for more than a decade now, has very little regard for traditional notions of copyright law. They are not, properly speaking, content thieves in the way the term is usually understood on GFY, because your typical GFY content thief has both a profit motive and deliberate criminal intent. Your typical blogger has neither. Rather, he's simply part of a culture in which people are publishing for reasons other than profit, and so everybody in that culture has a shared understanding that stuff they publish will be republished without permission. There are intricate expectations and cultural norms governing the nature of the credits that must be given, but permission and payment? Neither expected nor offered -- and anybody who asks is automatically the world's biggest asshole.

It is, pure and simple, a different internet subculture than the one most GFYers are used to. But it's huge and it's old and it's astonishing that you had not discovered it before tonight, because it comes into conflict with the porn business all the freakin' time. For obvious reasons.

A blogger's view of intellectual property:

1) The internet is for sharing and linking. If you don't want people reposting something, you shouldn't post it on the internet in the first place, you dumbhead. Because this is what the internet is for. Duh.

2) If you repost something a blogger posted, it's a compliment. But only if you link back to the blogger. If you don't link back to him, then you're a thief, or at least a dickhead.

3) If you are the true legal copyright owner of something that you discover on a blog, the polite thing to do is to write to the blog owner and nicely ask to have your ownership or authorship credited by means of a link to your website. Which must be cheerfully granted. Anything else you do -- like complain to the host, or file a DCMA notice, or rudely demand the removal of the content -- makes you a dickhead.

4) Everyone is aware that there are a bunch of obsolete laws out there that don't match these cultural norms. And from time to time, various dickheads will invoke those laws, and posts or blogs will be lost. Shit happens. It's just a cost of doing business. But culturally, in the blogging world, you don't want to be one of those dickheads.

That's the blogging culture. I'm not trying to defend it, any more than I would try to defend 4chan. It just is.