Everyone’s stealing jokes online. Why doesn’t anyone care? | Hacker News Reader

Everyone’s stealing jokes online. Why doesn’t anyone care?

washingtonpost.com

37 pointszbravo44 comments

> The important thing isn’t who created it, but who shared it—you!—allowing readers to become purveyors of entertaining content to their friends. We’re all complicit now in the joke black market, each share an act of criminal fencing.

This is pretty funny stuff. Imagine the beautiful world of the future, in which kids in playgrounds telling jokes to each other make sure to attribute each one to its original author... Or the dystopian alternative, in which nobody creates jokes because the legal and cultural protections of their intellectual property aren't great enough.

This seems like an obvious situation to me - people have been repeating jokes to friends since long before social media, whether jokes they've seen at a live stand-up show or knock knock jokes from the playground/office. Why would it be any different now that we can tweet rather than just speak?

It would be a joke to prevent jokes from spreading.

You can't steal a joke - it isn't property. You can plagiarize it, or infringe copyright. But the first isn't a crime, and the second requires litigation to pursue. So nobody cares because generally, these alleged infringements are tiny pin pricks and not big sword stabs - the sharing of tiny throwaway bits of creative content without permission just doesn't hurt that much. Some people are getting rich off doing it on a large scale, but they probably aren't hurting any one person that much. I'm not saying it's right, but it's not so wrong that any individual is motivated to care.

> You can't steal a joke - it isn't property.

Steal has more meanings in English than just taking someone else's property without permission or legal right. Many more...it is quite a versatile word, as you can see below.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

steal |stēl|

verb (past stole |stōl| ; past participle stolen |ˈstōlən| )

1 [ with obj. ] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | [ no obj. ] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers | (as adj. stolen) : stolen goods.

• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.

• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.

• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.

• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.

2 [ no obj. ] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.

• [ with obj. ] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.

noun [ in sing. ]

1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.

2 chiefly N. Amer. an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.

• an idea taken from another work.

• Baseball an act of stealing a base.

PHRASES

steal someone blind see blind.

steal a march on gain an advantage over (someone), typically by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are stealing a march on their competitors.

steal someone's heart win someone's love.

steal the show attract the most attention and praise.

steal someone's thunder win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress.[from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its brief run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”]

But clearly, people who take a stricter stance regarding "intellectual property" want to use the most common definition of "to steal", of taking someone's physical object away. A weasel word, or a little dishonest, since we are dealing with a completely different type of situation:

- When someone copies your content, you keep it. A loss happens on an abstract level of potential lost profit etc. - Someone else just might have had the same thought process as you and distilled some widely available piece of information into the same joke as the official joke author. Who owns it? - The joke author has probably processed a vast amount of humor, and information in general and inevitably, unconsciously builds his joke on this foundation without being able to "attribute" anything.

I'd say if you have a good case you can do fine without using the s-word.

I generally come down on the side of copyright infringement is not theft - it's something different. If I copy the latest pop song, no one has been deprived of it.

However, in the case of plagiarism (and related forms of passing of another's work as mine...), there is something really akin to property theft: credit theft. If you take my words, and pass them off as your own, and get credit for them rather than me - well then it is pretty much the same thing as you taking my dollar: I am deprived of it.

The only definition that applies here is

dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own

However, the article (and the whole copyright lobby) mentions that spreading jokes (or other copyrighted content) is "stealing" even if you also attribute it.

Semantic nonsense.

I think this is actually a mixed issue; reuse/remixing of content is essential to culture, especially an internet one. However, the attribution issue is a huge issue in its own right, and IMO a cultural one. Would we care if someone stole a few words? We definitely would if it was a full-blown parody. You do see people getting called out on it in places like reddit though, and even comedians in real life. In the end it depends how much value a group places on originality and properly sourcing information.

Yep, you're right.

As a writer, marketer, creator and consumer of content, I enjoy thinking about things like this. I've witnessed my work being plagiarized and edited before. I personally accept it as just the way reality is– some people are lazy about attribution, and other people like feeling talented and special when they diliberately share others' content without attribution or remixing.

The answer to "Why doesn't anyone care"- it all boils down to incentive structures. "Parody accounts" can steal with impunity. "Casual randos" can steal with impunity.

- If you're an artist, and faceless, nameless folks plagiarize your work, going after them actually makes you look insecure or clueless. (Metallica and Napster come to mind.)

- If you get plagiarized by someone Bigger, Badder and More Powerful, then that's a news story in itself- you're the underdog, and everybody loves to root for the underdog.

The best response to plagiarism, in my opinion, is to make more art. Some artists get very offended by this- they feel that they are entitled to all the attribution to all their work forever and ever. And that would be a beautiful world, I guess, and maybe discussions like these help to educate people. I also can imagine a world where- when you make a joke that's been made before (online), or you post an image that's been posted before, a sort of reverse Google / reverse image search will reveal to readers where the origin of the remix is.

For anybody who is curious about this sort of thing, I highly recommend the video Everything Is A Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk

At which point does a semantic snippet or invention become significant enough that it should be licensed? Two words? Three? A new word? This capturing of positive externalities is getting ridiculous.

> "in politics and journalism, plagiarism remains a serious, even career-killing charge. So why is it any different when it comes to jokes online"

This is just a bad comparison.

The difference between the two cases is that the people stealing jokes online aren't professional comedians. The correct comparison to the average person stealing a joke online is to a professional politician who ... steals a joke online. Telling jokes isn't in their job description so it's considered something they do in their spare time. And unless your hobby crosses a line and reflects poorly on your profession, no-one cares about your hobby.

However, if you're a comedian stealing jokes (online or off), the charge remains a very serious and career-damaging charge. True, no-one particularly cared about a random twitter parody account stealing jokes but that's because it's also not a professional comedian's work. (Or at least not identifiable as such.) If that account were unmasked as the work of a professional comedian, we'd see a much different reaction.

As to the content mills and people reposting content without attribution -- that's its own problem, larger than jokes.

I find it interesting that the only industry that seems to be totally fine with sharing is the restaurant/foodie business sharing recipes. I am sure there are some cases of people fighting over who plagiarized who but mostly it seems like free recipes online in abundance and cooking books still seem to thrive.

It probably happened because recipes can't be copyrighted (though particular writeups of them can). They had no choice, and it turned out to work just fine.

I would imagine Coca-cola would not be pleased if you took the recipe to their beverage and started making your own at home. Which is why it's not published anywhere and kept a closely guarded secret.

Some big companies still care greatly about their recipes.

Sure but I don't consider Coca-Cola to be part of that industry.

I'm not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, even after reading the article.

Perhaps I'm just too jaded, but it's becoming increasingly more clear that the entire Internet is just a giant echo chamber. Everyone parrots everyone else.

That's not to say there aren't original ideas out there, but for every one new idea, it gets reblogged and retweeted and re-Buzzfeed-ed a million times.

I'm not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, especially after reading the article.

They are drawing an arbitrary line between sharing a joke without credit and plagiarism.

It might just be me, but when my friends tell me a joke I just expect it isn't theirs. Unless they explicitly tell me.

All the reblogging and retweeting is just the dissemination. The internet is, essentially, for that purpose. It's necessary to spread information in such a way when people seldom look outside of their favorite echo-chamber.

I am surprised the author avoids the two obvious counter-arguments completely. One, jokes are generally very short. 5 words, 10 words. This is not comparable to a song, or a book, or a movie. I'm not saying a lot of creative effort doesn't go into crafting of a joke, but its rare that a joke takes 4 months to create. That reduces the perceived value of a joke (time invested to create) to almost nothing. And lets be honest, most jokes are created in a few seconds.

Second, Twitter intentionally limits the size of a tweet. So the nature of the medium adds an incentive to chop off the name of the author or be forced to remove words or abbreviate. This makes the joke less funny.

Comedians call these "street jokes." The problem is that social media is speeding up the plagiarism process. The good thing is you have a paper trail now.

A friend of mine that is a standup had a joke of his told by The Jokeman Jackie Martlin as a "street joke" and recently saw a poor version of it in a proper for the TV show "Cougar Town." It happens.

A tweet isn't the same as stealing a comedians set and for most comedians ist the "way they tell them" that realy makes it funny - only Woody Allen would be able to realy do justice to say the "moose" sketch or the late Pete Cook the Judge sketch.

And the Full English sketch only works if its an Asian commic doing it.

Repeating jokes without attribution has been the cultural norm for centuries. The whole notion of plagiarism and copyright and such are the recent inventions.

Thank good nobody cares, that just means that the intellectual property mafia hasn't indoctrinated us so much yet as to destroy any notion of a common culture.

> Thank good nobody cares

I don't know if this was a typo or intentional, but I like it very much as an unobtrusive and religion-neutral substitute for "Thank God". I will probably use it in future (maybe even without attribution :-) ).

"Thank goodness" is popular with the people who think "Thank God" is blasphemous.

Most people I know say thank goodness because god doesn't exist.

Oh good, another one of these discussions.

> "Thank goodness" is popular with the people who think "Thank God" is blasphemous.

Sure, and with others; but I have never heard "Thank good" before.

This article's thesis seems somewhat questionable, given that none of the examples it cites are actually funny.

I think it is actually very difficult to steal a good joke. There are very few jokes I have heard told by a comedian that I would even consider retelling.

It depends on the comedian's material. There's a lot of Louis CK jokes that are standalone funny. You can read the joke in text, and it's funny.

Meanwhile, someone like Gabriel Inglesias is also very funny, but it's funny because of how he tells it just as much as what he's actually saying.

Anyone in the UK here, Keith Chegwin has been doing this for years, what he does now, is steal someone's tweet joke and then block them on Twitter.

Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I'm surprised at some of the responses here.

So you have never shared a joke a work, got home and repeated the joke to friends or family?

People like to have a laugh. Most people repeating the joke are not claiming credit for creating it. They found it funny and shared it so others could find it funny to.

Twitter gives you an easy way to share the joke while retaining attribution - the retweet.

I agree that most of the people are just sharing the joke, but a sizable lump of them are trying to create some kind of online brand which they use to get money.

So if we legislate against those people, we also legislate against anyone who tells a joke online.

>Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I'm surprised at some of the responses here

Source code isn't written to be shared or to entertain others with. Quite the opposite, in fact, as we strive to protect source while still releasing the products built from it.

A bit of an idiotic comparison really.

Stealing from a comedian would be horrible, if it was done to a comedian who only used their own material.

I couldn't give a crap if someone "steals" a small snippet of my code equal in significance to a single joke. Anyone who claims to have learned programming without doing that is lying or delusional.

I think recipes are another example of something where it's considered acceptable to copy.

Stealing jokes is not possible since no one owns them.

Someone's always cracked wise before you.

Indeed. It seems to me that we overlook independent invention far too often. Jokes seem especially prone to independent invention to me. Maybe others differ.

If we as a society turn copyright/patents/trademarks/"intellectual property" into the ownership of ideas (as opposed to a limited monopoly to increase the public domain, which is what Thomas Jefferson intended), then we need to seriously consider independent invention. It happens all the time. Consider the safety pin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_pin), nominally invented in 1849, but clear precusors exist from the Bronze age. If "Intellectual Property" exists, shouldn't we remunerate the heirs of the true Bronze Age inventors?

This is an ongoing problem: current US patent cases are very rarely about copying, and are mostly about independent invention: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1270160 We're clearly depriving some "Intellectual Property" owners of their rights and remuneration! To Arms!

Always downvote reposts. OP's sexual preferense should also be questioned.

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