Adapted from my post at GeekFromKansas.com.

We all have experienced this phenomenon. One day, we see some interesting tidbit of information. The next day, we see it again, on a different Web site and it is a bit less interesting. By the eighth day, having seen exactly the same thing twelve times, it has become annoying. Well, at least it has become annoying to me.

Some people just find it a natural part of both StumbleUpon and the net. They are not upset or offended by it at all, and that is obviously their right. There is no need that they be offended. But, to me, it is like seeing the same commercial for the fourth time during a half-hour show, or being crapped on for the fourth time by the same seagull. When I click on that Stumble button, I always hope for something fresh. Intellectually, I know that I am not going to always get my wish. Still, emotionally, I don’t want to see that same damned information several times.

The vast majority of these repeated posts were published originally as the Web equivalent of the paper press release. Somebody, either a manufacturer or an advertising agency, wanted people to see these things for commercial purposes. And many of the things are indeed interesting. The people who pick up the original (or a copy) of the electronic press release and copy the words and picture onto their own page just want to get some advertising revenue without having to do much work. Most of these secondary posts at least have a link back to the original. This is all harmless enough, albeit annoying.

But when the repeat is of someone’s blog, or someone’s serious article, and is republished under the name of a person not the writer, it is more than annoying. It is downright theft. I have a feeling that photographers feel that way when they see the fruits of their labors on another site, with no link back to the original. That is when the topic of intellectual rights comes into play.

But even that gets complicated. Our basic concepts of property rights, intellectual and otherwise, are rooted in the 16th and 17th centuries, and sometimes even earlier. The types of things that we now “invent” daily were not even thought of back then. More to the point, the media in which we expose our intellectual property has changed drastically over the years.

There is a feeling, and I cannot say that I completely disagree with it, that when we put something on the internet, we have posted it on the village wall with a single thumbtack. There is little to stop someone from wandering by and taking the original, or making their own copy. In a very real way, if you didn’t want it taken you should not have put it up on the wall. These are all things that we have to sort out as a society, and I hope that we will do so in the near future. For now, people don’t steal my stuff all that much, really. It might not be as good as I think it is.

And those repeated articles that we Stumble across, I guess, really are not much more than an annoyance and a waste of our time. While neither of those are good things, they are not really horrible, either, I guess, as compared to the war in Iraq and broken bones. At the same time, I cannot help but wishing that people would write their own original stuff, every time, instead of ever hijacking any one else’s. I know that is an impractical hope. Still, StumbleUpon in particular, and the Web in General, would be a more enjoyable place if all of the content was at least semi-original.