The ultimate Internet attribution instructive flowchart: "See Something? Cite Something."

"A joint chart and public service announcement from two comic artists who are sick of having their work miss- or unattributed to them. Here's the right way to show your artists some love."

What you see above is but a snippet. View the whole chart in its full mindboggling and ROFL-rofling beauty here.

(notquitewrong.com, thanks Rosscott via BB Submitterator)

• [Sean]

  Hey! flow charts are cool, i should make a flow chart about finding cool things on the internet and sharing them. But how will people know I made it. I know! I’ll put a section of the flow chart about citing your sources! Cause everyone loved it when their 9th grade teacher went on for hours about “giving credit where credit is due”…

  It’s the internet! Almost everything here is stolen and reused without credit. Get over it!

• [blueelm]

  I think as image searches are getting better this becomes less of an issue for some. For instance, some times I find an image I like that some one has used as an avatar. Obviously I can’t really see a source like that… and it’s not always possible for there to be some kind of link available.

  But more recently I can grab the url and search for images like that, which often allows me to see what the original thing was.

  Hopefully continued development on things like that will also make it more embarrassing for those people who think it’s cool to stamp their names across other people’s work.

• [Rosscott]

  Thanks so much for posting this comic that me and Caldwell worked so hard on! It’s been a goal of mine to get something pertinent on BoingBoing since I started making comics.

• [Bookburn]

  This was so funny – I was going to print it off and hang it in my science classroom. (I’m always trying to stress netiquette as well as show off great ways to graphically organize information) Then I read the dramatic conclusion.

  Maybe I’ll just share it with a few close friends.

• [sapere_aude]

  It would have been funnier if BoingBoing had posted this without attribution. ;-)

• [Grrrrrrrr8]

  I had some pictures from a project of mine get very popular all over the place. Someone had put them up in imgur and gave me no credit. So lots of other blogs linked to it or copied it and also gave no credit despite the fact that a 2-second google search would’ve revealed the source.

  But one guy did do that search and took an extra couple steps to figure out my real name. That dude is Scott Beale from Laughing Squid and he’s fucking gold in my book for doing that.

  • [Rosscott]

    Imgur winds up doing that all the time. It’s happened to my stuff in the past as well. Sucks!

• [Beelzebuddy]

  Artists are so cute when they think they can exert control over how their works are used by making angry rants about it on the internet.

  You really should have cropped the image to the bottom portion of the comic, Xeni, the one made of angry faces, prissiness, and (unattributed) 4chan memes.

• [Guysmiley]

  http://www.tineye.com is handy for trying to find out the source of a rehosted image.

• [z7q2]

  I’ve made thousands of photoshop pieces for Fark and 4chan over the last seven years, and with very few exceptions all my source images were stolen from the internet. I say ‘stolen’ emphatically, and proudly so, because that’s the language the copyright cartels have forced into the discussion. The internet is my palette, and when I am stealing and manipulating images in a creative trance I no longer have time to consider asking for permission or giving attribution.

  I actually tried asking for permission for my Fark pieces awhile and all it caused was problems. People don’t answer, or want to negotiate, and by the time I actually would get permission I wouldn’t be interested in the piece anymore. Fark photoshop contests are time-sensitive, and 4chan constantly moves in real-time, so any delays are muse- and opportunity-killers. I also tried attributing for awhile by linking back to the source, but some people would take offense after the fact, and then poof, my work was gone.

  Arguably Fark and 4chan are making money from my work via ad revenue, but I certainly am not, I pay for web hosting and software and spend thousands of hours making these things. I don’t watermark them or sign them, and I am absolutely delighted when I find people hot-linking to them or stealing them. It means they like them! There is amazing personal satisfaction when my mom forwards me one of those ‘funny pictures’ emails and there is one of my old pieces in there. It’s like a years-long conversation – the internet speaks to me in images, I speak back in images, and then enjoy the echoes that result from that.

  Commercial and fine artists understand well the perils of not attributing or getting permission for their source images, but they are arguably in it for the money. I’m in it for the fun of it, I am compelled to make these things and release them into the cloud, my sole motivation being to entertain. I acknowledge that I build on a huge body of existing and constantly expanding visual work which has never been available until now, and it is a very exciting place to work. However, this blanket attribution will have to be enough: “It came from the internet.” Discovering the source in my work must be an exercise for the viewer.

• [Rosin]

  Whërë dìd ýøµ fìñd thìs¿ Ït’s køë| bµt
  këëþ dì¢kìñg ârøµñd.
  |ø£

• [JennifferHuang]

  Oh im the first one to comment on this.
  The best thing you can do, if you cant see any easy way for attribution, is to copy the image, and link back to the original site. Unless the website explicitly says “do not copy” then I think this is ok.
  Jenn

• [Anonymous]

  I would love to be a fan of the creators for most some of the awesome graphics, photos, art, etc that I’ve stumbled upon what would be useful is a flow chart on how to back track this.

  don’t most photos at least have identifying info of: cameral model, date of photo and image number that would at least narrow a search if that info was indexed by engines?

• [a_user]

  TBH I actively avoid websites that put their marks on any and everything they have, though it sounds like the author is looking at the internet as the sole way of getting his name known. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been using the net since Netscape 1 was the coolest thing ever and the web has always had a helping of rude, grabby people.

• [Anonymous]

  Man, I totally found this on boingboing!

• [William George]

  On my first geocities website way back in the dawn of the web, I had a drawing of a ttong-chim/kancho (Look it up) as an accompaniment to a rant I wrote about how much I hate that.

  Five years later I see the image being used by someone on an expat messageboard as their avatar. (In fact, a quick Google image search for “Ddong chim” has it come up on the first page. The drawing with the red background)

  While it would have been nice to have been linked to the image, the fact was that I didn’t include a watermark or any other sort of identifying object… like a signature. And since the site was long gone by that point, I had no way of proving it was my drawing in the first place. Not being able to capitalize on the minor expat meme the image became was 100% my fault.

  These days I try to stick my URL on whatever I put out there. I have no way to control how people use the image, so I don’t sweat it and hope someone who copied it liked it and wants to share with others. I treat it was free publicity. Then again, I’m not trying to make money or control a copyright…

  That having been said: Anyone who puts their own site logo on someone else’s work needs their fingers smacked with a hammer.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    So what we call “Here is the church, here is the steeple” is the Korean goatse?

    • [William George]

      Antinous: The kids do seem to worship anus-related humour here in Asia.