Content sharing: legalised theft?

I am pretty old fashioned. I believe that books should not be copied, I sneer at traffic light fake-book sellers and I am generally convinced that intellectual property rights should be inviolate. Which is why the Internet bugs me sometimes. This blog carries a lot of content (I'd say more than 97 percent) which is mine. I create it, I research it, I attribute all the sources, but its basically something I created. In terms of photos, I mean photos I clicked, photoshopped into clarity/composition etc. When I use external content, I never use more than an excerpt (unless its a press release, but that document type is created for publishing) and I offer backlinks prominently to the full content.

Now, I'm beginning to grasp that it is considered okay to willy-nilly pick up almost any content you see on the net and post it where ever you like. As long as a backlink is provided, the 'borrower' has apparently fulfilled all his obligations and is now free to do whatever the heck he wants with the content. Which strikes me as a bit odd.

From all the advertising you see at this blog, you would realise that part of the reason why I blog so religiously is that it pays (just enough to supplement my protective motorcycle gear once a year). Now get this. I post a set of images/specs whatever of a soon-to-be-launched motorcycle. The traffic this brings has a direct impact on my revenue. So when you go and 'lift' that image or text and post it on your blog, I lose some revenue. Effectively, in a brick and mortar economy, it would be like taking my book, putting your cover on it, adding a last page that says 'whatever you read was written by Mr so and so,' and keeping the royalties. In the brick-mortar world, that would be theft.

How this becomes okay on the net I can't understand, and it bugs the crap out of me.

Then I went around hunting for ways to prevent image theft. And I realised that not only is the problem I am facing common (actually rampant), but that since the Internet was devised as a way of sharing information, there is little I can do to prevent it. Among the measures are fairly complicated things from banning right-clicks, to changing htaccess codes, javascripts and finally, images in embedded flash. All of which, in my book is too complex to do everytime I want to post an image. So I'm going to watermark the images to within an inch of their lives.

I'm sorry, regular readers, that you won't get unmolested images here anymore. But you know where to place the blame. Everytime you see a watermarked image anywhere else on the Internet, you'll know why I watermarked it. And that's whether or not it is attributed to me.

Please consider this an extended, pre-apology for the inconvenience.

In the ideal world, I think other blogs would offer excerpts from my blogs and thumbnail pics at maximum and a well highlighted backlink to my site. That way, their blogs would become indexed at search engines, and I would still have the exclusivity of having full, in-depth content and images, and not lose traffic. At least, that is what I would do if I ever came to the point where I needed to borrow content from somewhere else.