No one seems to understand, no one seems to care and frankly I'm sick of it. User generated content, plagiarism, copyright infringement and spam are destroying the publishing industries and the hopes and dreams of aspiring poets, novelists, artists, musicians and those who build their businesses promoting and lifting up the creative minds of the world and nothing is being done to stop it.

This attack on creativity is coming from three sides with artists trapped in the middle. First there's user generated content websites-- most of them owned by multinational corporations with billions of dollars in their pockets. These "businesses" exist by getting their users to write, upload music, upload video and post pictures without paying those who post or those who create that content. This, my friends, is the NAFTA of the publishing industries-- the ultimate way to "earn" Billions of dollars without having to pay honest wages, or for that matter, any wages, to the persons who work and create the content with the net result being that advertising rates are driven down for the entire industry. And to add insult to injury, a huge amount of the content found on user generated sites is stolen content that almost never includes attribution unless of course the form of attribution is something called hot linking which is the theft of Internet bandwidth.

That's why Blogsboro.com neither participates in nor allows other sites to hot link our content.

And no matter what you think of advertising, advertising is the way producers of content be they publishers or creators, get paid to work. It might be that ad rates are high for some of the biggest players but overall the market is down and expected to drop even more. Especially for the little guys.

Another attacking force is the low budget blogger/splogger who builds blogs and websites that feature no content of their own. There are literally millions of these sites with most marked with a huge block of Google advertisements filling most of the top fold of the page. And if you've ever tried to report these sites to Google you'll quickly learn that Google makes that almost impossible to do. I'd venture to guess the majority of the Billions of dollars Google earns every year come from copyright infringement. And to think, Google prides themselves on doing no evil while continuing to perpetuate and fund Internet sharecropping and copyright infringement world over. And in doing Whois domain searches on many of these blogs and splogs I've come to notice that many of them are owned by some pretty big players in the publishing industry.

And finally there's spam. Currently, well over half the energy used to run the Internet is used for spam and while the persons who send you spam are usually small time operators their customers are the largest corporations in the world. Spam alone is running up the cost of Internet services to homes and businesses as well as the cost of the gasoline that goes into your car, the price to pay for natural gas, electricity, clothing, food, houses, gifts and everything else you buy. It might be that spam blocking software you installed works so well you never see spam but that software did nothing to reduce the price spam is costing you, the publishing industry, the aspiring artists and the world.

The cost of spam alone could end global poverty and homelessness and no one gives a damn.