Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. So after my video last week, a Nerdfighter posted this picture to twitter with the caption, "Who wore it better, Tom Hanks in Castaway or John Green in Vlogbrothers?" Also, someone in comments noted "The puff seems to have migrated south for the winter." So yeah, I trimmed my beard, okay.

In other news, Hank, there is this line from my book Paper Towns, "I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met," and that line has been quoted a lot over the years.

I mean it pops up all the time on Tumblr. It has over seventeen hundred likes on Goodreads.

Now, it's no, "If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane." It's not even one of the most quoted lines from Paper Towns, but it's definitely sort of widely out there in the world. There is even a poster available at dftba.com designed by Nerdfighter Risa.

Now, Hank, to be totally honest with you, I don't remember writing the words "I'm in love with the cities I've never been to and people I've never met" but then again, I don't remember writing a lot of Paper Towns. That book came out seven years ago.

Sometimes I'd be on the set of the Paper Towns movie and I would be like, "Why is this happening?" and Jake Schreier, the director, would be like, "Because it's in the book," and I'd be like, "Oh yeah, right, how is the book anyway? Is it good? I hear there is a little bit too much Walt Whitman."

So yeah, when I started seeing the quote a few years ago, I just assumed that it was in Paper Towns; people kept sourcing it as being from Paper Towns.

I suppose instead of blindly assuming I'd written something that the Internet said I wrote, I should've done some research, but, you know Hank, how many of us have failed to fact check something on the internet? Most I would think.

Flash forward to last week when I come across a post on the copyright subreddit, and it's like, "My friend wrote a thing on Tumblr that is now being attributed to John Green; in fact, like, they're selling a poster of it," and then at the end of the post she was like, "You can just control-f and search for that quote in Paper Towns; it is not there." So I did. I illegally downloaded a pirated copy of my own novel, I hit control-f, I searched for the quote. Sure enough -- not there.

So Hank, it turns out "I'm in love with cities I've never been and people I've never met," was written by a thirteen-year-old Nerdfighter several years ago. On her Tumblr, she often quoted my books a lot and made art using quotes, and so someone, somewhere assumed that line was written by me, and then yeah.

Now this poor young Nerdfighter, Melody, gets lots of hateful asks in her Tumblr inbox from people who are like, "Why are you stealing John Green's quote?!"

I stole it! I am the thief!

So Hank, just to be clear, we've been selling a poster with a quotation attributed to me that was in fact written by a thirteen-year-old Nerdfighter.

Now obviously Melody and Risa are going to share the royalties from that poster. We're retroactively paying Melody for the posters we've sold so far, and also when I saw this artwork of Melody's I was like, "I really like that; we should make that a poster at dftba.com," so now we have, it's available for pre-order. All the royalties go to me, no, they go to Melody.

Now Hank, admittedly I'm a bit of a grapefruit for getting into this situation in the first place. Like, this isn't the first time that a quotation has been misattributed to me.

Like, there's that line from the series finale of the television program One Tree Hill that has been attributed to me like seven hundred thousand times on Tumblr, but I did not write that.

But I think a wrongly-attributed author, even a very grape-fruity one, failing to notice the misattribution in question, speaks to how screwed up credit and sourcing and copyright are on the internet.

We do an especially bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

So Hank, there's my story of how I came to believe I'd written something I actually hadn't.

Hopefully, we've gotten it right now, but I'm sure that somewhere, someone's copyright is still being violated in all of this, which reminds me to tell you, Hank, that starting soon over at Crash Course there will be an introduction to intellectual property and copyright law, which is a great interest to all of us who care about the internet and also like, art and the making of things, so you can check that out soon at Crash Course, and hopefully, together, we can get better at this stuff.

In the meantime, please support Risa and Nerdfighter, Melody by getting their posters.

Hank, I will see you on Friday.