Plagiarism crossing Newsies and Death Note fandoms
It appears that a Fanfiction.net user named dexy's midnight runner has plagiarized a story written as a collaboration of three people that was posted under the username sloanne in August 2003. Those authors are also known by the usernames Funkiechick and studentnumber24601, according to the profile for the sloanne account.
dexy's midnight runner's story called 'Call Me Cupid' is an almost direct copy of sloanne's 'Everything You've Done Wrong.' The first chapter of 'Call Me Cupid' was published in June 2012. The difference between the two stories is that 'Everything You've Done Wrong' was a fanfiction about characters from the movie Newsies. 'Call Me Cupid' was the exact same story, but the names were changed to characters from Death Note.
You may have noticed that the link to 'Call Me Cupid' leads to an error page and that dexy's midnight runner's profile is blank and does not list any stories. At the time of the discovery, Sept 18, 2012, dexy's midnight runner had two stories, both works in progress. The other story appeared to be original, unreliably determined by searching the internet for verbatim lines of text from the work. It was called 'Destination Unknown.' As of this evening, Sept 19, both of the stories have been deleted and dexy's midnight runner's profile now only shows her avatar.
However, I was able to take many screen shots before the stories disappeared. I have collected them all into a folder on Photobucket. I took captures of the entire first chapter, the beginnings of all seven chapters, as well as the Author's Notes at the end of most chapters. I did this to prove that every chapter was plagiarized, minus the song lyrics sloanne had included at the beginning of each of their chapters. If you read as far as chapter seven of each story, you'll notice that dexy's midnight runner forgets to replace all uses of "Dutchy," which she had changed to "Clyde" in previous chapters.
I took screen shots of the Author's Notes because they make it abundantly clear that dexy's midnight runner was claiming she had written this story. There is no pretending she was merely reposting this story without claiming authorship. Two notes that stand out as particularly damning are where she claims she based one character on her father and where she promises to make a character, "more badass in upcoming chapters..."
I've also created a compiled image of the first portion of both stories, side by side. I did have to make some changes to the images in Photoshop in order to trim out the borders of my browser so that the text of each fic would line up. I will happily provide the PSD file for this image so that it can be confirmed that the changes I madeight runner forgets to replace all uses of "Dutchy," which she had changed to "Clyde" in previous chapters.
I took screen shots of the Author's Notes because they make it abundantly clear that dexy's midnight runner was claiming she had written this story. There is no pretending she was merely reposting this story witho were superficial and do not alter the content in any way.
I did not take any screen captures of sloanne's 'Everything You've Done Wrong' as it remains available on Fanfiction.net and I do not have any reason to expect it will be taken down.
Here is a shortened list of the screen captures I made:
- Both stories, side by side, overlapped to demonstrate where the two align.
- Beginning of 'Call Me Cupid' Chapter 1
- Beginning of Chapter 2
- Beginning of Chapter 3
- Beginning of Chapter 4
- Beginning of Chapter 5
- Beginning of Chapter 6
- Beginning of Chapter 7
- Chp 5 Author Notes: "Mr. Keehl is loosely modeled around my dad's personality..."
- Chp 7 Author Notes: "I need to make him more badass in upcoming chapters..."
Again, all 19 screen captures can be found here.
I sent a PM to dexy's midnight runner on Sept 18th. I made no accusation. I wrote:
Hello,
I was wondering if you've ever written fanfiction for another fandom before? Is Call Me Cupid your first fic?
Thanks for your time!
dexy's midnight runner has not responded. Less than 24 hours after my PM was sent, her profile was emptied and both of her stories removed.
The initial discovery of this issue was made at a livejournal community. There, another user claimed to be an aquaintance of one of the two authors behind the sloanne account and stated they would try to reach them to inquire if this usage was authorized. They did not volunteer which of the two authors they know. As of this postin