Digital Theft Isn’t Always About Money 

Deyane Moses is one of nine rising community leaders who took part in Aspen Digital’s Community & Tech Leaders Initiative. Over the course of a year, the cohort. deepened their understanding of emerging technologies and explored how community perspectives could shape the innovation ecosystem. This blogpost and accompanying resource was produced at the conclusion of the Initiative. 

Have you ever found something you created living somewhere online where it never should have been? 

I have. 

Until now, I’ve never spoken publicly about what happened. Part of me was embarrassed. Another part of me thought that if I ignored it, it would eventually go away. It didn’t. Instead, it became one of the most humbling experiences of my career. 

Here’s the part that still gets me. I hold degrees in photography and curatorial practice. I work in archives and cultural preservation. I spend my career helping protect Black history. I was selected as an Aspen Digital Community & Tech Leader and chose to study the very systems that make digital theft possible. If someone with my background could still have their work copied and repurposed online, what chance does the average artist, nonprofit, or small business owner have? 

What started as an attempt to get my work removed quickly became a lesson in how the internet actually works and, more importantly, who it doesn’t always work for. 

At first, I thought it would be simple. Surely there had to be a phone number to call or a company responsible for fixing it. Instead, I found myself pulled into a maze of AI-powered customer service chatbots, hosting providers, content delivery networks, automated forms, and endless referrals. Every company seemed to point me to someone else. Every step led to another dead end. The internet felt less like a place built to protect creators and more like a system designed to protect itself. 

What surprised me most wasn’t just that my work had been copied. It was how normal it seemed. Digital theft has evolved far beyond someone downloading a photo or copying a paragraph. Entire websites can be cloned. Brands can be impersonated. Content can be harvested and repackaged in seconds. Artificial intelligence can learn from creative work without the creator ever knowing. Sometimes the goal

isn’t money at all. It’s attention. Credibility. Followers. Audience growth. Cultural authority. The appearance of innovation. 

As I dug deeper, I couldn’t stop thinking about how familiar this pattern felt. Black communities have always created culture that others have extracted value from. Music. Art. Fashion. Language. Innovation. The internet has simply made the process faster and harder to see. We are encouraged to share our stories, our history, and our creativity online, but very few people tell us how vulnerable that visibility can make us. 

Illustrator Danielle Coke (@ohhappydani) has spoken publicly about watching her artwork spread across social media while other people reposted it without credit. Many weren’t trying to sell her work. They were using it to build their own platforms, gain followers, and present themselves as informed voices on issues. That’s when it clicked for me. The theft isn’t always about money. Sometimes it’s about borrowing someone else’s credibility to build your own. That’s a different kind of theft, but it’s theft all the same. 

I used to think intellectual property theft happened primarily to “famous” artists. Now I know it happens every day to photographers, nonprofits, educators, entrepreneurs, and community organizations whose work is visible enough to be copied but not protected enough to prevent it. 

If you’re reading this thinking, That would never happen to me, that’s exactly what I used to think. 

There are steps you can take, even if the process feels frustrating. If you create anything, keep records of your work. Save your original files. Document when you publish something. Archive everything. Register copyrights and trademarks whenever possible. Learn who owns the platforms you’re using, and don’t be afraid to ask questions when something doesn’t seem right. If your work is stolen, don’t assume you’re powerless. You can file DMCA takedown notices and abuse reports. Pay the extra fees for domain protection. The most important thing is to act quickly and document everything. 

This experience reminded me that protecting our culture isn’t just about preserving the past. It’s about protecting the people creating it today. Black creators and community organizations are producing extraordinary work every day, but ownership doesn’t automatically come with visibility. We deserve better systems. We deserve more transparency. We deserve technology that values creators as much as it values content.

Most of all, we deserve control over what we create. And until that happens, we’ll have to keep teaching each other how to protect it.

The views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Aspen Institute, its programs, staff, volunteers, participants, or its trustees.