I'm aware that other blogs make liberal use of clip art, but I avoid that here, because it is ubiquitous and smacks of plagiarism, unless one uses one's own images, and I'm neither artist nor photographer. A better way to distinguish my blog might be to concentrate upon the text and the design. I may be right, I may be wrong, but that's my preference. I think there is still a place for the written word and that it has charms of its own.
As a webmaster of a different site than this one, I have detected many people using images found on my site, even using our server's copy of the images--in fact, that is why I am able to detect their use. It doesn't bother me, as it would an artist, because most of the images used on that web site are unoriginal and represent little investment in time on my part. However, I have many observations about this indiscriminate use of clip art.
Many times, other people's frequent dropping of images seems tacky. The owners don't realize that. It makes me wonder whether I should go about deleting images from my web site, because maybe the images make my web site tacky, too, and I'm just too close to my baby to perceive its ugliness. I seldom receive any constructive criticism or feedback about anything, so I don't really know for sure what looks good or bad. I only have my own preferences, which may be out of tune with the zeitgeist. Oh well. Such is the fate of many a small web site.
Also, I don't really appreciate people leeching bandwidth from my web site by coding a direct link, called a hotlink, to images on my site's server. My site receives no visitors that way, but is compelled to transmit data for the sake of another site. For fun, I like to replace images with banner ads for my web site. Some of these banner ads can be a bit risque, but too bad for the losers. That's the chance one takes by hotlinking. I have had many a belly-laugh from visiting other people's sites and seeing my banner ads. Months and even years go by without the owners detecting anything amiss. Thanks for donating space on your site to my viral advertising campaign, losers.
One of my acquaintances is an artist, and he gets far more irritated than me by image theft, because he perceives it as a threat to his livelihood. In fact, he's become something of an anti-pirate. I think his fears are overblown. For my part, I'd not want anything from his portfolio, even if he were to give his work away for free. It is often thus with people that worry over piracy. They have an exaggerated sense of their product's worth. At any rate, if he is so worried, it is a simple matter to protect artwork on the Internet. Offer a small version, rather than a large. Seems pretty obvious. Instead, he's fooling around with watermarks and javascripts, both of which can be circumvented. But he has not paid me for my technical advice, and giving it to him for free would be another form of piracy, wouldn't it. On the other hand, if he wants to pay my consultation fee of $49.99, then I might clue him in. He's called me up before asking me to fix his computer in exchange for artwork. Don't want it. Prefer the little strips of green paper instead.
Unlike my artist acquaintance, I don't worry overmuch about piracy, because I've never had any inkling that any of my stuff would be considered valuable by anyone else. No one has ever hired me on as a writer or given any sort of monetary encouragement to pursue my creative labors, so I feel perfectly safe in posting all of my creative work on the Internet, just as I feel safe in leaving the doors unlocked on my $1500 car. If someone wants to steal my thoughts, well, good luck with 'em, but you may be in for a bit more than you bargained for! Everything I do is protected using Igor's patented "Liberal Ideology" technology. I sprinkle my left-wing opinions into everything I offer online, so that if people copy my stuff, they are helping spread my memes in viral fashion. I'd much prefer they link back to me and give me credit for my work and am annoyed when they don't, but if my ideas spread, then that's really what matters, isn't it, especially after I'm dead and gone. It's a half-assed form of immortality. Perhaps in the future there will be more people sharing similar thoughts and feelings as me, and that's all to the good, I think.
