I definitely agree with you -- but I do think it's a double-edged sword. On one hand a lot of unauthorized content gets posted and people get frustrated because their original content is ripped/duplicated (with other people sometimes taking credit!), but on the other hand, the ease with which people can post stuff also leads to greater exposure.

Any extra steps to post content can mean the difference between something going viral and something remaining unseen in the dark corners of the Internet. I don't know if this is a good comparison, but this reminds me of the piracy study[1] that said piracy was beneficial for sales. These lists are a way of "pirating"/distributing content, though it seems without any real gain to the original creator due to lack of attribution (that's where the comparison definitely breaks down). I suppose the two would be more similar if you could somehow watermark the content to somehow point it back at the creator

Obviously, this method is really annoying for a lot of us, but the fact that it works so well and is generating all that traffic, likens it to all that Viagra spam we get -- people keep clicking! I don't know if there's any amount of technology that will help people gain common sense

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...