It should NOT, for the love of the gods, be a place where you endlessly cut and paste articles off wikipedia, About.com, ask.com, CNN, perezhilton, and all the other bazillions of webpages where people are already writing their own stuff.

First of all, many of the articles on those sites are copyrighted. That means if you c&p an article in its entirety from me, and post it on your website, you're technically in violation of copyright rules. Now, generally I don't care much if people do that, as long as I get (a) my name stuck on there as the original author and (b) a link back to the original url of the piece. But people seem to be unable to grasp that just because something is posted on "teh interwebs" doesn't make it free for all and sundry to CTRL-V onto their own site.

A bigger problem that arises is when someone copies one of my pieces which includes a photo. Because guess what? I don't own many of them -- I use them with permissions from Getty Images. That means you're not only using MY content without permission, you're using Getty's. And if you think Getty Images won't sue you for copyright infringement, you better think again -- they practically shut down Perez for a few days last year.

So back to my original snipe: if you create your own content, share your own thoughts, write your own words, then you don't HAVE to c&p other people's stuff. If nothing else, find a list of daily memes, and write about "what I ate for breakfast" or "why my grandpa was special" or "ten ways to entertain yourself with a toaster oven." Just, for pete's sake, make it be original.