Intellectual Property on the Internet

If you think you have rights, forget it.

If you do a Google image search of John Brzenk (one of the best-known armwrestlers of all time) or Lars Rorbakken (famous strongman) the above image is one of the first to come up. In fact, for Lars it’s the first.

I took this photo a few years ago. I’m no photographer, so I was pretty excited to have captured that moment. I’m also pretty pissed of that it’s been used, over and over again, without my permission and without even bothering to credit me.

What am I going to do about it?

Nothing.

Many moons ago I did a master’s in industrial property law (unfortunately that’s only patents and trademarks, I really wish I knew more about copyright now).

My take home message from all that (exceptionally tedious) study? If you want to protect your IP, you need lawyers and money. It’s as simple as that.

People steal stuff on the internet ALL THE TIME. And it’s virtually impossible to stop them or bring them to justice.

In the wake of Kel Campbell’s leaving Medium (see Hana Leshner’s article for more details), I will be very interested to see how Medium deals with plagiarism and alleged copyright infringement. It would be nice to see that within the platform, at least, infringing others’ IP rights won’t be tolerated.

I’m going to have to be a bit of a Debbie Downer about the bigger picture, though, because even if Medium does take action in this particular case, there’s nothing to stop the unoriginal and the unethical from taking your work from here and copying it elsewhere.

So, I guess it’s a question we all have to ask ourselves every time we publish something online: how prepared are we to have our work stolen?