A month ago I ran a photo essay on The Bold Italic where men with long hair were given lady-style updos. Maybe you saw it. Maybe you saw the beautifully designed version on TBI, or perhaps you saw the knockoff version on 9GAG two days later. I had no idea this back-alley version existed until Internet angel Shannon Green sent me an email about it on Sunday, nearly a month after both pieces ran. Her friend had posted the 9GAG version on Facebook, and Shannon recognized it from our site, noting the complete lack of credit and the appearance that my story was 9GAG’s original work.
Lots of publications re-ran the fancy lady hair story. The difference is, the others emailed me to ask permission, and I happily provided hi-res versions of the images that they then credited and linked back to the original piece. Classic Internet back scratching. Not only did 9GAG, a “user-generated platform,” compile the images in their entirety into one long file without crediting or linking to The Bold Italic, but they boldly added a “VIA 9GAG” watermark to my images. Images that I and 12 other people had participated in to create, shoot, and design, and that The Bold Italic had paid for. It’s all a bunch of bullshit, but it’s the watermarking the images as 9GAG’s own that’s the true bull-diarrhea that covered my Sunday morning.
I’d sort of heard of 9GAG, but I didn’t really know what it was. After some digging around, I came to understand that they are a stupidly designed, shady-ass website that makes money by hosting material other people have worked hard to create, because fuck you. Weirdly, their Wikipedia page doesn’t include that description, and instead defines the company as “an image based aggregator site.” They promote themselves as a user-generated platform, where people submit posts on the flimsy “good faith” that they own the material being posted — but then somehow, nearly all of that material gets watermarked as 9GAG’s own. (I reached out to 9GAG to comment on how and why the images are watermarked, as well as a handful of other questions, but never heard back.)
According to co-founder Ray Chan, as of Dec 2011, the site had 2 BILLION monthly pageviews. Since their launch, accusations have been leveled at 9GAG that the site employs people to search for things on sites like Reddit and Digg, scrub off watermarks and add their own, appearing as if they created the content. (Reddit detailed their dirty watermark-cropping fake-date-adding theft process here, via Uproxx.)
Now, I get that this is the Internet. People steal shit all the time, but to create a platform that encourages posting uncredited work — and watermarking it as belonging to a site that had no hand in creating it — is appalling. For those of us who have been screwed over by 9GAG, it’s an insane seven-part endeavor (buried in on the “Terms” page) to try to get work taken down. If you happen to discover your work on 9GAG, it’s up to you to “substantially prove” through electronic signatures, two written statements, two pieces of identification of the “alleged” stolen work, and thorough contact info that the work is yours.
It took my sending four emails — with just the original, time-stamped link to my piece — before I finally got a reply from 9GAG. They said they would not take timely action unless I provided the above Trapper Keeper’s worth of information. They added that they would contact the user — strangely enough, nearly all the other posts on their site have a user listed, and the lady hair post did not. That, along with the fact that the watermark was custom compared to others on the site leads me to believe something fishy was happening with this “user-generated” post. Later that day, they sent an email that “the user” took the post down.
Not that removing my work hurts 9GAG at this point — the post went up in August and it already had over 18,000 Facebook likes, and who knows how many page views that the site has already monetized. I also found multiple other 9GAG posts where the lady hair photos had been broken apart, and the “removed post” still haunts the Internet, cached in other sites with 9GAG’s watermark at the top.
I know that there are far worse things to happen in life, and getting pissy talking about pageviews and Facebook likes is borderline ridiculous, but man, it’s frustrating to discover a company so blatantly marked your ideas and work as their own, and then made a profit from it. Obviously I’m not the only content-victim here, there’s a whole Tumblr dedicated to stopping 9GAG. It just seems exhausting to try to scrub the Internet of their version of my work, and at this point, is it worth it? Probably not, but that’s likely the attitude from victims of shady image grabbing they’re literally banking on — along with their investors, which include Y Combinator and the 500 Startups accelerator.
So. Not. Cool.
