Description: A freebooting Twitter account (very likely without permission) posts a screenshot of a TikTok with no credit and gets millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes. The creators of the original video respond, and get next to no views. (And currently have 6 likes on the tweet.)
As a side note, go watch Almost Friday TV, their videos are hilarious and incredibly well directed: https://youtu.be/Y5HInrono_o
I’m so incredibly fed up with freebooters, but what can one man do really?
OOTL: what is meant by freebooting. Is it just reposting other people’s content without proper attribution?
You got it dead on.
It’s always been an issue, but it’s getting worse and becoming even more common.
The foundation of YouTube was people taking episodes of TV shows and trying to get around the auto filter by putting images off to the side etc. This has been common and previlant for a very long time now. Also see the ancient meme of “I made this”
Every meme I’ve ever seen has never given credit to the original creator unless it’s watermarked on the meme. It’s so weird to me that people get upset by this.
The monetization aspect is a part of it. Without any form of credit, eyes aren’t going back to the original creator, losing them potential earnings.
People who want to monetise their images need to add a credit to them. When I save an image and know who created it (which is very rare), I put their name in the name of the image I save so that I can give credit if I reuse it. If there’s an associated URL that belongs to the creator, I’ll bookmark it with the same name as the image so I can find it and link to it when I use the image.
That’s a lot of work to do on behalf of creators who cannot be arsed to sign their own images. Most of the time, I can’t do it because I have no idea where it came from anyway.
And they can sign images but not easily add a clickable URL so that’s not a perfect solution anyway.
I know this doesn’t cover all of the click-thefts. But a lot of those click-thefts aren’t really thefts. They’re crediting the original but it’s the repost that goes viral. That’s something that can’t really be avoided without some tools operating in the background to reallocate clicks to the creator. And that’s not going to happen because the hosts of the click-thefts have absolutely no interest in it happening.
There are some simple ways to avoid accidental theft though. On Twitter (old Twitter, I know nothing of recent Twitter), big accounts often (accidentally) stole likes and RTs by quote-retweeting instead of just retweeting. Most of the time, there was no need for them to add a comment. Just a straight retweet would have sent interactions to the original instead. There are some similar choices that can be made on other social media. Here, for example, an archive link is often the only way for many people to view the article. But if the original source is considered less evil enough to deserve the clicks, linking the original and providing an archive link is probably better than just using an archive link in the main post.
Lot of different issues, not all of them solvable, I don’t think.
It’s an old term for pirates. Some of us believe the term was repurposed/coined by Brady Haran on… iirc Hello Internet?
Yeah, specifically jumping between platforms. So for example the term was coined by YouTuber Brady Haran of Numberphile after his videos kept getting rehosted on Facebook video posts
A video and a meme are completely different things.
Glad to see that at least the Freebooting term is kept alive even if Hello Internet isn’t.
One of the best “2 guys talk” podcasts
Freebooting was the first sign for me of the downfall of reddit. It used to be that the community demanded credit to the creator at the very least. Once reddit added in their own video you’d get downvoted to oblivion for asking for a source, creator or even linking to the original. Reddit video made it ok to not only freeboot, but to freeboot purely for the purpose of removing the creator’s views as reddit only pays in karma.
Long story short, I’m glad to see that lemmy is stepping up and standing up for creators.
I don’t think I ever saw people get downvoted for linking the source. It was always considered a good gesture.
downvoted to oblivion for asking for a source
Is the pipes bot not doing exactly the same thing? Yet it get upvoted in this posts comments?
(Genuinely don’t know, the pipes link doesn’t load for me)
No, because piped is still loading the video from YouTube and retains all of the info for the creator’s channel from YouTube. The only real downside for the creator would be that if you normally watch YouTube without adblock then the channel isn’t getting your ad revenue since piped doesn’t have any ads.
But that doesn’t really give the creator any views, does it?
There is a way to mark a video as watched in youtube-dl (
--mark-watched), so it’s possible for Piped to have the same thing.I don’t actually know for sure, but I’d imagine it still gives a view the same way watching an embedded video gives a view.
Shout out to almost friday. They have some great bits. They even have one with one of the WKUK
Immediately became my new favorite channel after watching like 2 skits. Hope they keep getting bigger and better. Loved the one with the WKUK dude, felt like a passing the torch moment.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Y5HInrono_o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
You’ve just given them more views
At least their TikTok id is visible in the screenshot
