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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38598
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38598
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

### It IS a bad thing to do, and possibly a violation of copyright you can be sued for if you make a profit from it.

I am not a lawyer, but I have dealt with copyright issues in my profession.

Dismissing people as "randos" is not a strategy that works in the court, it makes no difference to the court prosecuting a violation of copyright if the owner is famous or not. The same laws apply.

If the joke you steal exists in one place and can be attributed to a single person at the time you steal it, well, they own the Copyright on it (in the USA). The copyright exists the moment a work is completed, if somebody tweets an original joke, just because it was made public, does not mean it is free to use for the public. Nor do they have to put a "copyright notice" on it.

Your best protection for stealing a joke is to prove **before you stole it** that it could be found in multiple places on the Internet without any attribution to a single person. You can't attribute a joke to anybody if there are multiple plausible authors. The author is plausibly NOT protecting his intellectual property since you can find the joke in multiple sources.

That's it. If you can't find the joke anywhere else, don't steal it verbatim. After that, it depends on whether you change it sufficiently. Copyright protects words, not so much ideas; but I still cannot take a best selling Harry Potter novel, change the name to "Haro Putter" and studiously go through and change a word in every sentence, and hope to publish that as 99c book. A judge or jury would see through that and uphold the copyright violation, even though every sentence and name is different. You can steal the **idea** of the joke, whatever surprise twist it relies on to be funny, and write your own joke that way. Unless it is a play on words or homonyms. But you need the typical not-famous "randos" on the jury to agree your joke is just similar to the original, and not a thinly disguised rip-off of the original.

Original score: 1