Plagiarism

[Steve Spandex]

One of the Plaza's readers kindly emailed in, via Gromet, to inform me that my story "Long time Bound" http://www.selfbound.net/storieslr/longtimebound.html had been plagiarised on another website.

The new story had been retitled " A Weekend Like No Other" by someone calling themself "Amy Flanagan" and had been published on "Jeb's Adventure Bound" site. The story's narrator had been changed to a female, the character names had been changed, and a few passages altered, but essentially this was a word for word copy of my story.

I suppose in some ways I should be flattered that someone thought my story was so good that they claimed it as their own. But the fact that I had spent hours, days, weeks even, writing and rewriting this piece, only to have some parasitic lowlife 'steal' it is simply not on. (Especially as this was a partially true story, and therefore personal) 

I contacted the site involved, and in fairness, within 24 hours I had received an apology and the offending story had been removed.

I note, however, that this site also carries two other stories by "Amy Flanagan": "The Adventures of Agent Lisa" and "Not What I Intended". I would suggest that all writers on the Plaza take a quick look at these, just in case this dear little "Amy" character has stolen YOUR story as well!

And if "Amy" happens to read this (she must have got the story from the Plaza, as I haven't published it anywhere else) then I would request that she does the decent thing and contact me to explain herself (although I won't be holding my breath on that one!)

Anyway, just to let you know that I only write under the name Steve Spandex, so if you see anything on other sites that looks like they've been copied from my stories under other author names, then these are forgeries.

My sincere thanks to the reader who brought this to my attention, and thanks to Gromet for passing this on.

Has anyone else had similar problems?

Apologies for going on a bit, but as you can probably understand, I'm a bit pissed off about this.

[Maxine]

And fair enough!

[lightly]

Hello, I am the person who reported the plagiarism.  Normally I am the type of person who lurks creepily in the background enjoying everyone's hard work, but when I saw what had happened I just couldn't let it pass.  I used to write and was actually plagiarized myself once, it's horrible and I don't understand why, it's not like anyone gets paid for this.

But anyway, now I felt I had to join this forum to point out something else.  The stories by friends page on Jeb's Adventure Bound site hasn't been updated in quite a while.  If you go to the what's new page and do a page search for Amy Flanagan there are several other stories by her.

[jackierabbit1]

Thank you to both of you for the heads up. I wonder how much of this happens to us at the plaza that we don't know about.

Jackie.

[A Pensive Pen]

Thanks, all, for bringing this to our attention. There's too much hard work involved with our creations to ignore something like this.

[loras pa6]

I've had my stories republished on sites I never sent them to, but they always carried my Pen Name

[Daffy Duck]

Well done Lightly !

Thanks for doing the right thing.

I hope all readers have the decency and kindness to report such finds to the original authors.

As Steve says, this is not a nice thing to happen.

But sadly not everyone has the same values as the rest of us.

[Steve Spandex]

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that the other stories allegedly by "Amy Flanagan" must be stolen from someone.
I haven't actually read the stories in full, but they are of reasonable length and look to be well written. So why would a genuine author, who is quite capable of writing decent material, suddenly resort to pilfering and bastardising other peoples work? That doesn't make sense. I think they must all be dodgy.

I just hope that the true author of these gets to find out and has them removed too.

And once again, thank you Lightly for your vigilance.

Regards

Steve

[sealed4good]

Copyscape might be helpful here guys:   http://copyscape.com/

It searches the web for copies of text.

Best of luck finding the culprit. That is out of order.

[johnnyb]

Hi, i was reading this post, and before this, i think amy flanagan was a good writter, i was Wrong! i like to go to jeb's website too, but after read this i try to find the deleted story to read by myself the changes but what i found is worst, now another person "Speedoslover" have the same title in other web. I dont even finish to read the fake story.

I really think Steve Spandex is the best.

I left the link for the stolen story.

http://wipipedia.org/index.php/Story:_A_Weekend_like_no_Other

Greethings.
 

[TeaSer]

In this case I actually think Steven is wrong. When copying a story to the extent described it's not plagianrism, it's pure theft.

Plagiarism is when you get overly inspired by other peoples work and create your own work using themes, scenes, settings from the original work. As far as I can understand this is not the case here. If you as a writer realizes your work really is too close to the original story, you will of course honour the original and confess the inspiration. Sometimes, however, you may write a story not realising you in fact plagiarised.

When a story is rewritten just changing genders and names it's not plagiarism. You could say that translating is such an act as well - and if you do translate someones story, you must of course honour the original. But translations does have their place - in lots of situations even I find it difficult to follow descriptions in english and a danish translation would be of great interest.

You could well say that publishing a story on a website without the original authors consent (in fact the copyright owner - even if stories are published without anybody being paid) is stealing as well. And you'd technically be right. But if the writer is clearly spelled out, I wouldn't be too mad about it. Maybe I'd feel honoured by people wanting to redistribute a story of mine.

Rewriting a story the way described and not giving the rightful writer credit is truely lowlife and despicable. I fully understand Stevens emotions about it.

TeaSer

[Abbacor]

pla·gia·rism
ˈplājəˌrizəm/
noun
noun: plagiarism; plural noun: plagiarisms

    the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
    synonyms:   copying, infringement of copyright, piracy, theft, stealing


What is Plagiarism? http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism/

[A Pensive Pen]

Nearly all of the stories posted by Speedoslover are copied (with names changed) from stories posted by Amy Flanigan (including Steve's, but if the others were also plagiarized I didn't find it). I would hazard a guess that both posters are the same person.

[Steve Spandex]

Firstly, thanks to Johhnyb for pointing out yet another stolen version of my story, this time on Wipipedia. I have now set the the wheels in motion to get this removed also.

Re the "Amy Flanagan" version on Jeb's Adventure Bound site: Jeb contacted "Amy" about this, and came back with the following:

"Amy expresses sincere regret; she made a serious mistake while under the influence of prescription drugs.  She says that she will not be submitting any more to my site until she stops taking the drugs."

Those must be pretty potent drugs to turn you into a rampant plagiarist without you even knowing it! (I'm giving Jeb the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he's had the wool pulled over his eyes by "Amy" over this as well)

I get the feeling that this is merely the tip of the iceberg, and that there may be many more of  our plagiarised stories out there.

Anyway, I actually logged on to my laptop in order to work on my latest story, but nearly two hours later I haven't got around to it, as I've had to sort this mess out again.  So I'm not in the best frame of mind for creative writing at the moment.

Thanks for all your support in this matter.

Regards

Steve

[Steve Spandex]

Just to keep everybody updated:

Wipipedia have now been in touch with me, and have deleted this second version of "A Weekend Like No Other" from their site.