What happens when you use a random image from the internet for your own work? Mostly, nothing. Sometimes, if it’s owned by a big, rich corporation, you’ll get a cease and desist order and then you just have to take it down. Some images are in the realm of creative commons, which means they are made to be used by whoever wants to. But tons and tons of content is added to the internet by people like you and me, who are not corporations or even sole-proprietorships, just people who like to create and share.

Remember that pic I used to talk about the ajuma in the Lanterns of Daegu?

Funny story —

The friend I went to Daegu (from here on “D”) with sent me that pic a few weeks earlier after a conversation in which we’d been sharing “worst ajuma” stories (the one that shoved you out of the way so she could stand one person closer to the subway door you are already walking out of, the one who plowed into you despite the fact that there was plenty of room on either side, or the one who shoved you while you were dripping wet from the rainstorm, then got mad you made her wet, too). I liked the pic so much, I decided to use it as my example, relying on the artist’s signature to credit the art.

To understand the next part, you’ll need a little background on the EPIK program. Every spring, a few hundred new teachers arrive, get oriented, and are released into the wilds of Korea. In order to help them adjust, EPIK assigns the new recruits in a mentor/mentee system to any of us who were not scared away after the first year. I had a mentor last year (who was 22 and at her first job out of university, but hey), and this year I am a mentor. It ensures that new folks have at least one experienced expat they can turn to for advice.

Less than a week after posting this picture, I found myself on a trip where I met some of this year’s crop of EPIK teachers, and as I was exchanging FB and Instagram contact info, one of them was revealed to be this very artist, @shmamee. She asked how I’d gotten introduced to her art and I explained the IM from a friend (“D”).

“D” is a second year EPIK teacher and therefore also a mentor. If you have any sense of narrative prediction, you’ll see where this is going… “D” is @shmaymee’s mentor! @shmaymee and I thought that “D” must have gotten the art that way, but when I asked, it was not so. “D” had simply found the art randomly on the internet and decided to share it with me, not knowing that the artist was her own mentee.

The internet does a great job anonymizing us, turning each work of art or each written story into some distant and impersonal thing. However, the person who introduced me to @shmaymee was none other than Annemone, a blogger who found my page when she was planning her own move to Busan. A simple comment on one post enabled us to see the invisible threads of connection that united us all in this crazy little expat world.

It got me thinking, too. I do my best to use my own content on this blog. I write my own stories from my own experiences and thoughts. I share my own photographs unless I have no other way. I have tried to become more aware of permission and credit when I do use someone else’s content. Is this copywritten? Is it creative commons? Did I make it easy for my readers to find the original artist?

I don’t make any money off of my content (photos or writing), in fact, I pay an annual fee for the privilege of putting it online. If you see ads on my blog, it’s because I buy the cheapest web-hosting service I can and that comes with ads not of my choosing. This got me thinking how important it is that hobby content creators support each other, and that everyone supports artist/content creators who do this for a living (ie pay them). When my friends publish a book, I don’t ask to borrow it or (god forbid) to be given a free copy, I buy a copy. When I wanted art for my calling cards (left), I paid the asking price to Seth of 4sacrowd because I like their work and because we pay people for work. Google image search makes it so easy to find a picture of anything, but unless there’s a watermark, we often have no idea of the legal status of the image or of reproducing it. I don’t know the perfect solution, but I hope we can all do our best to remember that artist, writers and content creators of all stripes are humans, creating things that fill our lives with joy and meaning and that whether they are asking for praise, credit, money, or all of the above, that they (we) deserve it.

Check out these artists @shmaymee and 4sacrowd, look around your own friends and family to see who is creating and deserves your support. Make art not war! … or something like that.