“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met,” reads a line from John Green’s 2008 novel Paper Towns.

Except, it’s not from Paper Towns.

You may’ve seen the line floating around Tumblr or appearing on a poster, depicted above, in the DFTBA store and (until this week) attributed to Green’s novel. In theory, the quote makes sense in relation to the book.

But in a new YouTube video, Green himself admits he recently discovered this misattribution after assuming for years that it was from his book simply because everyone said so.

“I don’t remember writing the words ‘I’m in love with [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,” said Green in his video.

“So 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 that the internet said I wrote I should’ve done some research.”

Green finally realized the misattribution when he read about it on a copyright sub-Reddit. After learning of the accusation, he pirated a digital copy of his own book (his words) and did a search for the quote.

It wasn’t there.

According to the quote’s true author, Melody, the quote was published on her Tumblr unattributed, but since she typically featured Green quotes on her blog, many took the quote and assumed it was from Green. From there, it was forever attributed to the Paper Towns author.

Now Green will be giving Melody royalties for the above poster which they’re selling in the DFTBA store, including royalties for all previous sales. As another nice gesture, Green is putting up for sale another one of her posters (with another quote of hers).

In his video, Green used the opportunity to share some thoughts on copyright and the internet. “I think a wrongly attributed author, even a very grapefruit-y one, failing to notice the misattribution in question, speaks to how screwed up credit and sourcing and copyright are on the internet,” he said. “We do an epic-ly bad job of acknowledging each other’s work and checking our sources.”

Watch Green admit to the mistake below with his usual entertaining delivery:

Meanwhile, the book to film adaptation of Paper Towns hits theaters this June.