Even in the digital world, standards are still necessary and some old rules deserve respect. Creators should still be fairly compensated for their work, and we shouldn’t tolerate stealing as the road to profit. And, as much as we love YouTube, we shouldn’t countenance the way its founders muscled their way to riches by enabling the online trafficking of stolen videos.

From garage entrepreneurs to mega-millionaires sounds like the quintessential American success story, except that e-mails released recently by a federal judge plainly show that YouTube’s magic elixir was theft, not creativity.

Consider the “business strategy” discussions in which the YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, concede that drew the original traffic to their website largely through offering stolen property which, they well knew, radically inflated the value of their site before they flipped it to Google for $1.65 billion.

As Chen wrote in one e-mail: “if you remove the potential copyright infringements “… site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20 percent of what it is.”

In a discussion with co-founder Hurley about competing for content with a rival website, Chen advised: “steal it.” And when Hurley demurred, Chen responded: “We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. How much traffic will we get from personal videos? Remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type [stolen] “… viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”

Chen’s suggestion of stealing may well have been tongue-in-cheek, but Chen and his colleagues clearly knew their website depended on its users to upload copyrighted work — without any respect for the economic rights of the actors, producers, directors and other professional artists who created it in the first place.

Admittedly some in the “free culture” fringe argue that anything that can be digitized should be common property, posted to the Web and free to anybody who wants it. The counter to that is a moral philosophy that philosophers from Aristotle to John Locke have been teaching us for millennia: “Don’t take things that aren’t yours.”

I’ve poured my heart into my written work, as have most other professional creative artists, and we expect to be paid a fair price for our honest labor. As my Arts & Labs colleague Mark McKinnon put it: “It’s not free culture; it’s freeloader culture. When you become a millionaire by stealing other people’s work and get treated like a hero, it tells me that the Internet ecosystem is getting out of whack.”

What’s more, excerpted memos from David Eun, then head of Content Partnerships at Google, seem to suggest that playing fast and loose with copyrighted content might be a way to pressure content creators to cut deals with Google and embrace the “free” business model. After Google adopted a digital fingerprint system that could have been used to identify and block copyright infringement on YouTube, Eun wrote that the capabilities “are only offered to partners who enter into a revenue deal with us.” Similarly, an internal Google video presentation contemplated: “pressure premium content providers to change their model toward free.”

Happily, Google has moved away from that initial instinct and now says it’s committed to policing YouTube against copyright abuse. But the episode shows that the Internet is vulnerable to the tacit acceptance of mass larceny. So let’s follow Google’s lead and not allow crime to pay on the Internet. We all wind up losers if dishonest speculators exploit the Web’s wonders to pickpocket their way to personal riches.

ANDREW KEEN, an advisor to media/technology coalition Arts & Labs, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author. He wrote this article for this newspaper.