Ok, here's the thing. I write, edit, speak, and publish for a living. I have published magazines, blogs, photographs, and academic papers. I have spoken on the topics of role play games, small business, interpersonal communication, and fandom.

When I do these things, I put hours (sometimes months) of my time into research, writing, rewriting, editing, rewriting again, composition and delivery of my unique product.

Just like your time, mine is worth MONEY.

When someone copies my content to earn money for themselves, they put in maybe a minute or two of work. Sure I got a little "plug" in the form of a credit line that might have driven a few users to look at my original content or maybe got me noticed by a place to do a speaking engagement, but you got money. You got the money **I** did all the hard work for.

Why should you get paid for all of my hard work? Because you found my content and introduced it to a new audience?

If I **ask** you to advertise for me or copy-paste my content, great! I felt you would be a valuable channel for my message. If you ask me and **I give you permission** to copy-paste my content great! I looked at your audience and your content and decided it increases the value of my image.

If you don't have my permission to use my content and you use it anyway you could actually be hurting me in several ways;

1) Your other content may paint my content in a bad light. At worst, if people see you as a bad person, associating my content with you could lose me reputation and income.

2) You could be stealing my viewers and opportunities. If people can go to you for my content, why would they bother coming to me?

3) You are diminishing my income source. As I said, I make my living producing content in various forms. It is NOT your content, every cent you make from MY content without MY permission is money you have stolen from me.