Plagiarism Blows!

Monday, October 29, 2007

First: thanks bunches to Sara Sue. You’ll find out why in a minute.

About two years ago, I did a review of Peter Schaffer’s Equus for my site. You can read it here if you like; it’s not long. My motive for writing this review—indeed, my motive for writing all my reviews—was to inform and recommend literary works that I personally find enjoyable, thought-provoking and worthwhile. I did this in the hopes that the reviews would spark interesting conversation. I also did it for free.

I was blog-hopping this weekend, and I swung by Sara Says like I always do on or around Friday. While I was disappointed that I didn’t find what I look for every week (it’s been postponed), I did find a link to this post, all about content theft, copyright infringement, and how to protect yourself from same. So, thanks to Sara for posting the link; and thanks to Mike, whoever he is, for sending it to Sara, so she could pass it on to everyone looking or free boob pictures.

I remember Malach had an issue a year or so ago with someone displaying his artwork without his permission. I decided to take Lorelle’s advice and see if anyone had been ripping me off, so I went to Copyscape and started typing in webpage URLs from Angrypiper.com. I went through about nine or so, until I found what I was looking for. You see, it seems that last year, on the island of St. Thomas, USVI, a production of Equus made the rounds. It fell to the St. Thomas Source to cover the story. Based on what I’ve been able to determine, the “Source staff” who was assigned to do the job lifted a little less than a hundred words from the book review originally posted on Hill TV, word for word, without my permission. You can see for yourself here.

I find it very easy to imagine this job being handed off to someone who doesn’t normally cover entertainment news, perhaps an intern; someone who probably had no idea what the play was about but had to write a review. Hence the generic “Source staff” byline. Rather than read the play himself (something that would probably take the average literate person a whole two hours to do) or even rent the movie (again, two hours max with no reading invlolved), he decides to hit the web for a synopsis. “Source staff” Googles “Equus review” and gets my site. He figures Angrypiper.com for a small vanity site (which it more or less is), and he figures the traffic is probably low (actually, it’s higher than you’d think), so the chances of discovery are minimal. He’s right; I probably never would have noticed it if not for Sara Sue’s link.

It should be noted that I am ignoring Lorelle’s advice right now by posting anything about this before attempting to resolve this issue. But I don’t expect much in the way of resolution. The St. Thomas Source probably has a small circulation (not counting, obviously, the Internet). Besides, the page is full of dead image links and probably isn’t visited very often, and since the production ended a year ago, it hardly seems relevant, does it?

It does to me. Understand: when I first started posting book reviews, I pretty much expected “uncredited excerpts” of them to wind up on term papers and stuff like that. What really bothers me about this is not so much that “Source staff” stole my work without asking and published it as his own. (Although that does bother me a lot; if he had asked, I probably would have given permission, and contacting me is easy. My mailto link is on every page of my website.) What bothers me is “Source staff”, last time I checked, was a job description, kind of like “staff reporter”. Which means that in all likelihood, he got a paycheck for the review, a significant part of which I wrote. Call me wacky, but I feel that if anyone should get paid for my work, it should be me.

Here’s what I’m going to do. First, I plan on emailing the editor of the St. Thomas Source to inform him that whoever “Source staff” is, they are guilty of plagiarism, as they have falsely misrepresented another’s work as their own and have profited by it. He did mention the “essay” at Hill TV, but said it was written by the playwright, which is not only completely wrong, it displays a level of irresponsibility and amateurism shocking in a newspaper, even a small one (especially a newspaper who calls itself ‘The Source’). Hopefully even small newspapers have a zero-tolerance policy on that. I don’t expect any financial reimbursement. I just want them to be aware of it.

Second, “Source staff” has ensured that I will never, as I had previously planned, publish one word of my fiction online. I refer to my serious writing endeavors. I will still, from time to time, publish various Tales of the WoW on the Wand of Wonder, so don’t fret. But if I put my heart and soul into a story only to have it stolen and posted as someone else’s, I’ll turn into the Hulk, and I’m already angry enough.

One more thing. I only got through about one-third of my web pages before Copyscape wouldn’t let me search anymore. They limit you to ten searches per domain per month, unless you pay for more. I didn’t search for any of my blogposts. I’m not even sure how to do that, since my blog is still hosted by Blogger. I didn’t get through all my Book Reviews, and I didn’t even start searching for my Angry Rants. But I will.

I wonder how much more of my stuff—and yours—is out there.