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

&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;ve seen at a live stand-up show or knock knock jokes from the playground&#x2F;office. Why would it be any different now that we can tweet rather than just speak?

You can&#x27;t steal a joke - it isn&#x27;t property. You can plagiarize it, or infringe copyright. But the first isn&#x27;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&#x27;t hurt that much. Some people are getting rich off doing it on a large scale, but they probably aren&#x27;t hurting any one person that much. I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s right, but it&#x27;s not so wrong that any individual is motivated to care.

I think this is actually a mixed issue; reuse&#x2F;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.

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.

&gt; <i>&quot;in politics and journalism, plagiarism remains a serious, even career-killing charge. So why is it any different when it comes to jokes online&quot;</i><p>This is just a bad comparison.<p>The difference between the two cases is that the people stealing jokes online aren&#x27;t <i>professional</i> 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&#x27;t in their job description so it&#x27;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.<p>However, if you&#x27;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&#x27;s because it&#x27;s <i>also</i> not a professional comedian&#x27;s work. (Or at least not identifiable as such.) If that account were unmasked as the work of a professional comedian, we&#x27;d see a much different reaction.<p>As to the content mills and people reposting content without attribution -- that&#x27;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&#x2F;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.

I&#x27;m not too convinced about the urgency of the issue, even after reading the article.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m just too jaded, but it&#x27;s becoming increasingly more clear that the entire Internet is just a giant echo chamber. Everyone parrots everyone else.<p>That&#x27;s not to say there aren&#x27;t original ideas out there, but for every one new idea, it gets reblogged and retweeted and re-Buzzfeed-ed a million times.

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&#x27;m not saying a lot of creative effort doesn&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;street jokes.&quot; The problem is that social media is speeding up the plagiarism process. The good thing is you have a paper trail now.<p>A friend of mine that is a standup had a joke of his told by The Jokeman Jackie Martlin as a &quot;street joke&quot; and recently saw a poor version of it in a proper for the TV show &quot;Cougar Town.&quot; It happens.

A tweet isn&#x27;t the same as stealing a comedians set and for most comedians ist the &quot;way they tell them&quot; that realy makes it funny - only Woody Allen would be able to realy do justice to say the &quot;moose&quot; sketch or the late Pete Cook the Judge sketch.<p>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.<p>Thank good nobody cares, that just means that the intellectual property mafia hasn&#x27;t indoctrinated us so much yet as to destroy any notion of a common culture.

This article&#x27;s thesis seems somewhat questionable, given that none of the examples it cites are actually funny.<p>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.

Anyone in the UK here, Keith Chegwin has been doing this for years, what he does now, is steal someone&#x27;s tweet joke and then block them on Twitter.

Stealing a comedians joke is similar to stealing a developers source. I&#x27;m surprised at some of the responses here.

I think recipes are another example of something where it&#x27;s considered acceptable to copy.

Stealing jokes is not possible since no one owns them.<p>Someone&#x27;s always cracked wise before you.

Always downvote reposts. OP&#x27;s sexual preferense should also be questioned.