Sigh.

[cleolinda]

So someone else has run off and reposted my work (this time, it's Twilight in Fifteen Minutes. NO DOGPILING, Y'ALL). I don't go looking for this stuff, because honestly, if I started trying to police the internet--which I did try for a little while, back when I was first writing these things--I would never, ever get anything else done. But I feel

Comments

[narnian_dreamer]

I'm sorry. That totally sucks.

It's really terrible that an instant and free way to share information and entertainment has made people disregard intellectual ownership like that.

My education profs say that the internet increased plagiarism a thousand-fold.

[annemjw]

On the other and the internet also means that anyone stupid enough to plagiarise from it can be caught very quickly, which is quite fun. Ah, the paper trail of electronics. As it were :D

[bexone]

i know that middle school-aged kids are always shocked when my mother proves she knows how to operate the google machine, has that spread all the way up to college already?

[annemjw]

Oh baby, yes. To be fair, it is often the tutors/teaching assistants (i.e. the youth of todaaaaay) who will do the googling for the less internet-able of the academic dons, but even the most crusty of them mostly understand the concept of 'type in the phrase you think is plagiarised into this box on this page you can get to by clicking here, and by golly you will be able to tell if someone else has written it before'.

Plus there's turn it in (not foolproof, but) and similar websites that do the hard work for some tertiary institutions.

[myfebruarysong]

People like her piss me off, to be frank, and I'm not big on swearing. She gets all mad at people saying she didn't write it because now everyone who read it will know the truth! Gasp!

Anyway, at least you know you've got people watching your back. Sometimes it's really beneficial to have such a huge following.

[cleolinda]

Well, I wouldn't call it huge, but it's far-flung enough that there's almost always one person on any given site who'll recognize my stuff.

[staringat_stars]

Also incorrect. If I cared about people knowing that I didn't write it, which I already explained in the comments, I wouldn't have edited it at all. I never claimed to have written it.

[bluinkalchemist]

All I did was make an account on that site just to ask if she wrote it. Although I knew already she didn't.

A little passive-aggressive, maybe. But I didn't want to start a dogpile right away. Since, you know, you told me not to.

[cleolinda]

Yeah, I did see your comment early on, and that was fine. : )

[bishsticks]

I really don't understand people sometimes. I had a fic stolen and put up on ff.net once. It was word for word my story, but with the characters' names changed. Someone called them on it. And you wouldn't believe the number of comments after that, in support of the thief, saying they didn't care it was stolen, because they liked her pairing better than mine.

It took almost two months to get it removed. :(

Then I was alerted to a BNF in our fandom that had also stolen word-for-word my work and changed the characters around. And many came to her defense as well.

I hate thieves.

So I'm sending some negative thoughts on your behalf and hope you get it all straightened out soon.

Here's a cute puppy icon in hopes of cheering you up a bit. :)

[manekikoneko]

The same thing happened with some Christian author who published something online a few Christmases ago, and was shortly thereafter told that a lot of people recognized the story from a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" book, by another author, and yet his fans defended his plagiarism as some sort of valid reinterpretation of the original (e.g. he changed the name of the child to that of his son). People are just weird. Sadly, I think it comes back to the comment above; writers' ownership is just no respected by a lot of people.

[cleolinda]

Ohhhhhh, I remember hearing about that.

What I've found is that people who defend blatant wholesale plagiarism have never, ever experienced it from the other end. Because once someone's stolen your work--or, better yet, come up with cracked-out excuses as to why that's okay--you suddenly have a comprehensive understanding of exactly why it's wrong. As such, a lot of the people who do it haven't ever written anything "real" (i.e., not a fic stolen from someone else with maybe a couple of details changed), and so because they've produced nothing of value, they don't respect the value of anyone else's work. Even if it is "just a fucking Twilight parody."

[count_01]

This is not just a fucking Twilight parody. This is a fucking Twilight parody!

See, that's the difference.

[corinnethewise]

::Hugs:: Hope the day gets better. I totally know the feeling of being really pissed about something that maybe I shouldn't be spending so much energy on. Especially when tired. Go you putting in a full day on Vampires though! I'm super excited to read it when you've finished.