• How far does the free sharing of your work and ideas on the Internet benefit you, regarding authorship and originality?

My question relates to the growing cases of plagiarism due to the help of technology. I agree with Goldsmith when he says that your work receives more attention, visibility, can be spread out much easier and you can network much more through the Internet, which, like he says, can makes wonder to a career like his. The constant flow of information that people have access to is something wonderful as well, specially with websites like Goldsmith’s, UbuWeb. However, I am not sure until what point the free sharing of your work can be beneficial to you, when in the Digital Age, people can easily copy and paste what you did and make it theirs. 

Unfortunately, I believe that the “older proprietary ways of thinking [that] condemn this practice with the fear that your ideas would be swiped”, which Goldsmith talks about, are not so old. I say that, due to the fact that, nowadays, there are so many readings that could be easily found on the Internet, that people can just take that opinion or work and make theirs and only a certain number of people (a certain community) would know that and would do something about it, if they read the person’s work, the rest wouldn’t. 

Thinking of this, it might be the case that people not only charge to share their work on the Internet, because of financial issues (of course), but also because of authorship, that is, making sure they get credit for their work. 

There is certainly a fine line between the benefits and disadvantages of free sharing on the Internet and as everything, the difficulty is finding the right balance.