Plagerizing is not cool.
I just found a completely plagerized story on ff.net. It's here. I hope she deletes it after she reads my comment. Once I realized I'd read a story almost exactly like this before, I pulled out the book (which just happens to be one of my favorite Star Trek books), I realized practically this entire story was copied word for word
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plagarized it. But I have removed the story if it makes you feel any better."
This was my reply:
Borrowed? You copied his words. You basically copied and pasted paragraphs
from his book into your own story. You took his dialogue and claimed it as
your own. That's not borrowing. That's plagerizing.
If you'd just used the basic idea like Spock and McCoy trapped on a planet
with Klingons pursuing them, but then came up with your own interpretation
of it, that would be borrowing. If you'd used his McCoy's mannerisms and
personality, but used your own dialogue and storyline, that would be
borrowing.
It doesn't make me happy that you're taking down the story. I really don't
care either way. It's your credibility on the line, not mine. To be
honest, I was enjoying your stories up until that one, but now I'm not sure
if it's your writing I'm enjoying or someone else's. Are those your
descriptions in your other stories? Or did someone else come up with them?
Sorry to be so harsh, but Covenant of the Crown is one of my favorite Star
Trek books, and to see someone else rip it off really burned me.
I can't stand when people do stuff like this. It's one thing to use plot devices from books in a story, which I've done in some of my older fanfics, but it's something completely different to copy dialogue word for word or use another author's descriptions. There were probably at least 9 or 10 more passages that I know of withouth re-reading the book that were ripped straight from that book.
How do I know if her other stories didn't come about the same way?
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Yeah, I think that was the best point you made--if you enjoy the writer's work but find out they plagiarize, suddenly it throws everything you've read by them into doubt. Are you enjoying that author or the other people they've stolen from? It ruins their own credibility--not, I suppose, that people like this care much. *sigh*
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It's one thing to say "Oh, that was a funny line that McCoy said, I wonder if I could use it sometime" since McCoy tended to recycle his insults/lines/whatever throughout the show. But to copy whole paragraphs outright was just stupid. And so obvious to anyone who's read that book. It seemed familiar right from the beginning, but I'd thought maybe I'd read the beginning of that story before and just never finished it... then I came across that first paragraph and it hit me where I'd seen it before.
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