we light the way

I understand your feelings, anon. A couple of years ago, if I found out that a person had reposted my gifs here on Tumblr, I’d write to them asking them to delete it — because it was created by me, and all that — or at least to indicate credit to my blog. But most of the time, it ended with the phrase, “I found this on Google, Pinterest, and blah blah blah.” Either, as you mentioned, they’d say, “it's not your footage,” or the thief would just block me. Well, at some point, I stopped trying to figure out how to sort things out. Now, if I see that someone is stealing my gifs, I just immediately block that person. I’m tired of wasting my time explaining to reposters how wrong it is to steal someone’s gifs. They’ve never created any unique content, and they just don’t get it. Otherwise, they wouldn't have stolen the gifs. These people just don’t respect other people’s work.

It’s not a bad idea to use a watermark. Many gifmakers do it. I even made one for myself, but I decided not to use it yet. I’m not sure how to put this, but a watermark can kind of ruin the aesthetics of a gifset for me, you know? But that’s just my opinion, though. Maybe I’ll start to add watermarks to my gifs someday too. Or I’ll just stop doing anything.