[AO3] plagiarism | "tell 'em all I said hi, have a nice day..."

[waltzmatildah]

Hello, hello, anyone who might still be here! I have been disgustingly AWOL and even now am really only popping back for advice, which is incredibly presumptuous of me, but if anyone's going to be able to answer my questions, then it's LJ people!

I've discovered that a person on AO3 has plagiarised a heap of my Grey's Anatomy and Rookie Blue fics

Comments

[swirlsofblue]

Hello! Lovely to see you back here.

Sorry, I don't know if I have any good advice. Maybe try emailing them again, as I seem to remember getting a response within two weeks for a query but I suppose with plagiarism it would take them longer to look into. I would say maybe leave comments on the entry if you want to communicate and in those comments put links to the story they've stolen, that way mods can see and anyone else reading can see. Maybe ask people on tumblr, there seems to always be info on there about dealing with plagiarism.

Also it might be worth looking into how new the person is to fandom, they may not even realise they've done something wrong and may think they're just sharing or something.

Good luck with exams!

[waltzmatildah]

Hello!!! How are you??! I hope all is fabulous for you :D

I've had a look at the person's fannish habits and it seems they've been around a while (they post across about 7 fandoms, I think. Or 4? More than just Grey's though), and I've also spoken with a couple of old LJers that I know IRL (miss_blanche, catteo, and addikat), and they all seem to agree it looks pretty deliberate and calculating. The person hasn't just posted my fic wholesale with their name attached as though they're sharing or recommending something, they've chopped up several of my fics (across two fandoms) and reposted them with some of their own (or someone else's??!) words into 'new' fics. I found one drabble of theirs that was 100 words exactly, 7 of which weren't copy/pastes from various fics of mine. It's almost like this person has gone through all my fics and copy/pasted paragraphs and lines they like and then put them all together into new fics. One of them is 12.5k words long!! There is some serious effort here!! The fics are very discombobulating for me to read, because I know

[swirlsofblue]

Things are going well thanks.

Eep that definitely sounds very deliberate. Good luck with getting it sorted. I never understand these people, if they're going to go through that much effort to put different fics together why not just write their own.

[waltzmatildah]

I just had a google of ‘how to deal with fanfic plagiarism’ to get an idea of what’s generally accepted these days. While there are a minority of people saying “fanfic is plagiarism anyway so you need to put up with it”, it seems most feel it should be called out calmly. From my own point of view, I credit where necessary, and obviously labelling the show and the characters is an important way of doing that. I don’t feel that writing fanfic is the same as copy pasting someone else’s fanfic and calling it your own with no mention of the other person at all. And I do think the former is okay and the latter isn’t. Now I’m trying to decide if this makes me a hypocrite like some would have me believe! Haha!

[swirlsofblue]

You're not a hypocrite at all! It's like, Steven Moffatt gets credit for creating BBC Sherlock, and he didn't create Sherlock. Paradise Lost is fanfiction of the bible. Those are just two quick examples off the top of my head.

And if you want to send a message privately, you can put a comment and then delete. Then it only exists in the person's notifications.

[waltzmatildah]

I just sent them a comment, as per what I outlined to bleodswean below.

Fingers crossed this is the end of it. Thank you so much for your help!