Crediting Other Users’ Content
The Instagram account fuckjerry, along with a few other high profile accounts like thefatjewish, have become notorious over the last few years for stealing other peoples’ content.
It seems Elliot Tebele, founder of Fuckjerry, is finally starting to understand what copyright law is and has issued a statement via Medium:
I know I’ve made enemies over the years for using content and not giving proper credit and attribution to its creators. In the early days of FuckJerry, there were not well-established norms for reposting and crediting other users’ content, especially in meme culture. Instagram was still a new medium at the time, and I simply didn’t give any thought to the idea that reposting content could be damaging in any way.
In the past few years, I have made a concerted, proactive effort to properly credit creators for their work. We have also updated our policies to make sure we are responsive to creators whenever they have reached out to us about posts. It hasn’t been a perfect system, but I do feel it was a significant improvement, as many of my peers have approached these issues in the same way.
Given the conversations over the past few days, and the issues that have come to light, it is clear however, that we need to do better.
Effective immediately, we will no longer post content when we cannot identify the creator, and will require the original creator’s advanced consent before publishing their content to our followers. It is clear that attribution is no longer sufficient, so permission will become the new policy.
Comedic video editor Vic Berger posted a very Berger-y video making fun of Tebele that was pulled from Youtube but has reemerged on Vimeo.