hotspur18's plagiarism of setissma's fic

[sheafrotherdon]

On August 12, 2007, hotspur18 posted The First Concern of Amber to her livejournal. The post was removed earlier this afternoon, but screencaps of the beginning of the story can be found below:

[screencap one]
[screencap two]
[screencap three]
[screencap four]
[screencap five](I kept the frame of my browser in the first cap so that people could see the

Comments

[sevvy_o]

Hi, I'll be the mod reviewing this case. It seems like most of the work has been done so I'll write up a report and put hotspur18 on the list. Thank you.

[sheafrotherdon]

Hi!

Several more plagiarized fics posted by hotspur18 have been discovered over the weekend. There are updates and summaries [here], [here] and [here]. We've archived screencaps and text files of the plagiarized fics as well as links to the original stories.

Thanks so much!

[raemcn]

Please, any info you can give me with links would be highly appriciated. I'm co-owner of an award site and I've just found out all this news. At this moment I'm shaking I'm so upset because I know she has been given awards for fic that I have no idea if it's stolen or not.

[sheafrotherdon]

Everything we've found so far is in the original link up in the main part of this post, or in the links in the comment you replied to. We're still looking at some other stories - they've pinged several of us as familiar from other fandoms, but it's hard to track stuff down if people have their journals protected against search engines (as far as such a thing is possible).

If you have any links yourself - of fics she submitted, etc - we'll be happy to go look and see if we can determine if they were plagiarized.

[sheafrotherdon]

We've identified another fic that hotspur18 plagiarized. Full details can be found [here].

We've stopped actively looking for more examples at this point, simply because of the time it's taking. We're beat! But it's clear that a) hotspur18 is a serial plagiarist and b) that she's either unable or unwilling to come clean about the entire affair, having told two seperate sets of community moderators in the Buffy fandom that she can't say if her fics are all plagiarized or not.

[sheafrotherdon]

Oh, and we have another one, ladies and gentlemen. Details [here]. RARR.