Etiquette and credit for creations

Pondering after reading other posts how different communities have very different senses of what they’re–I suppose the best word is proprietary–about.

I remember when I first started reading livejournal, it seemed odd that people would credit who they found a link from. I mean, the link itself was out there, public information, and the maintainer of the page seemed more relevant than who told me about it. Slowly I figured out that this was livejournal etiquette, though–and more, a good way of cross-promoting one another’s pages–so I started doing it. But it still puzzles me when someone gets irritated that–not the information itself, but the fact that they found it–hasn’t been credited.

Elsewhere on livejournal today, several fanfic writers were talking about how irritating it is when someone links to your material without your consent. Now to me, once the material is online, it’s like it’s been put up on a billboard; and anyone can say “hey, look at that billboard” without needing to get permission from the billboard creator. I accept that fan communities have their own standards here, but it’s startling, because the person who points to the billboard is not in any way altering it–she’s not messing with the creation or the rights of the creator to present it as she will. She’s just saying, “Hey, look over there!”

As a writer, what I expect to be proprietary are the words themselves. Once I put them somewhere, anyone can point to them, whether they’re online or in a bound volume–I actively want them to point to them, in fact. What no one has the right to do is to make a copy those words. Point all you want; no one owns the right to point. But someone does own the words, and the right to make copies of them, and in addition to being illegal, making unauthorized copies is hugely disrespectful.

And yet … it seems that the same fan communities (or maybe different ones; presumably not all communities have the same standards) that are so uncomfortable with the idea of pointing to something without credit … are fairly comfortable with the idea of pirated copies: of mailing videotapes around, or scanning images, or putting text online without permission..

So maybe I’m missing something here, or maybe I’m conflating two things that aren’t really equivalent. But it seems a little odd that communities would be troubled by not crediting who first pointed to or noticed a creation; but be untroubled by taking that creation and making copies and passing them around.