Sites like Facebook and Imgur profit off of the value of original content created by third parties in the hopes that most of the value will be squeezed out of it before the creator notices or has a chance to send a DMCA takedown notice.

I increasingly stumble across complaints from artists whose videos will have as few as 150 views on YouTube, while the pirated copies that someone uploaded directly to Facebook (with all of the true creator's information removed) have millions of views.

One person I directly contacted was a woman named Leslie Hall, whose stolen video on Facebook had over 20 million views, which is more than twice as many views as all of her YouTube videos combined. She has been uploading videos to YouTube for nearly a decade in her struggle to make a name for herself, and when she finally got some attention, it was in a corrupted form where no one knew her name or how to find more of her videos (other than the 0.02% of people who bothered to use Google-fu on the lyrics to find the answer). She also lost tens of thousands of dollars in YouTube Partnership ad revenue, de facto stolen from her by Facebook. The comments section was full of people who loved her, but they all had no idea who she was. Since Facebook refuses to do the ethical bare minimum and swap freebooted viral content with a link to the original creator's true source, all she succeeded in doing was to send a DMCA takedown notice and get the Facebook video page deleted, destroying all of the organic momentum that was pushing in her favor.

This problem will naturally become much worse now that Facebook has tweaked their algorithms to heavily favor the spread of videos directly uploaded to Facebook, while punishing external links to YouTube by automatically preventing them from becoming as popular.

Imgur has a similar problem which is especially damaging to webcomic artists. It is such a destructive problem that even /r/funny on reddit has banned the practice of sharing links to rehosted webcomics. Imgur, however, is still perfectly happy to do it. Every day you can find multiple webcomics on Imgur's front page containing an album of half of a webcomic artist's life's work, usually without any link to the creator's actual website. This pirated copy gains millions of views, and the artist is left with nothing to show for it, not even a page hit. All of those millions of views represent potential fans who perhaps would have liked to buy a book from the artist or some other merchandise, and the artist would have been able to pay the rent for another year. Instead, all of that money goes to Imgur ad revenue and T-shirt sales. Imgur also passively gets all the cognitive goodwill from their users who mistakenly associate the pleasure of reading the stolen comics with Imgur, rather than with the artist where it belongs. Most artists I inform of this theft are incredibly sad about it but have already reached the stage where they feel utterly defeated and helpless.

I feel that some sort of reform is needed to compel large sites to implement something similar to the Content ID system on YouTube, or at least require due diligence in finding the true creator and 302 redirecting the link of the stolen copy to the true source.