A few months ago, I started dipping my toes into the waters at Reddit, where I’ve heard that, if you get enough karma, you can share videos here and there to good effect on your viewership numbers. For the most part, I’ve kept to the YouTubers subreddits, where I’ve been doing my thing by critiquing other members’ works.

Recently, I popped into another member’s video and saw him perform a comedy bit that seemed….really familiar. He put up a number of images that I knew I’d seen before, and with a 30-second Google search, I found the website where he’d taken his entire script, word-for-word, from a comedy website that had been shared frequently on social media a few months back.

In my critique, I mentioned this, and said that perhaps it would be okay to use the site’s images and words as inspiration, but to lift their material whole-hog from them and present it as his own isn’t really kosher.

He disagreed, and it was very difficult to navigate the waters of what he thought was “fair use,” and whether it’s ever okay to use someone else’s content for our own. I find this is a very slippery slope for many content creators, and that it’s incredibly easy for people to take things that they’ve found in other places and use them, in parts or….more-than-parts, for their own material.

This makes me a bit sad, and I know it’s not a popular viewpoint, but I feel there’s so much to gain by latching onto popular material (as it’s more easily searched and ranked on YouTube) and so much more difficult to get truly original material to catch on that I understand why using existing material that other people created, as an ever-growing foundation for our own material, works better than trying to start from the ground up.