Plagiarism

[poliphilo]

Someone just plagiarised a couple of sentences from my last post. They dressed 'em up a bit, but I know my own children.

It's a compliment, right?

I'm not cross (well, not very) and part of me is flattered. Since neither of us is making money out of this I don't regard it as any big deal. I just want the person that did it to know I know.

Dude, the convention is to put "borrowed" material in quotation marks and to give the original author credit.

Still, I'm easy. None of the stuff on this blog is copyrighted. And maybe (who knows?) there are other people out there taking credit for what I've done. I'm not a professional writer or photographer. My philosophy with this blog is that I'm putting messages in bottles and casting them out to sea. What happens next is up to wind and wave and ocean current.

Comments

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

What's the phrase? Good artists plagiarise, great artists steal?

If they were going to do it as some sort of meme, it would be nice of them to link back. Heck, the phrase 'shamelessly stolen from X' is a common one at LJ.

I knew it wasn't me because I doubt you'd be contacted by your ex and were requesting brownies as a result, but I checked anyway.

(I sometimes hunt down old posts of mine on another board, another name... it's another life. What an odd stranger she is.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, my ex is long gone....LOL.

No it wasn't a meme or anything like. It was a sentence or two of mine not so cunningly woven into a paragraph of theirs.

Strange. But thanks to what the_red_shoes has told me I'm learning that plagiarism is a lot more common than I ever dreamed it was.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It seems that all the books about plagiarism are written by "detectives". It would be interesting to have one written by an offender.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Mebbe someone is pretending to be you. I advice a course of rampant paranoia. Or you could give them a snarky reply requesting credit, if you haven't already.

See, now I'm suffering major deja vu from reading your post, because I know I have seen it somewhere before but I don't recall where. Oddly enough, it's probably from reading your post several times. It's deja vu-ing itself now.

Still, I'm sorry someone swiped your words without permission or citation. Our words are our credit in this online community, makig plagiarism more of a theft here than elsewhere.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I often look at lines I've written and think, "now where have I seen you before?" It usually happens when I'm particularly pleased with something.

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

Hee. I have a lot of brownies. I could restock the girlscout population at this point.

I've often written something fairly nice and thought "oh wait, did I create that or did I take it from somewhere else?". Sometimes I've found that when it feels like words just belong in a particlar order it's because I read them in that order by the original author. You read something good and it sticks with you, and there are unfortunate cases of inadvertant recycling.

As George Carlin said (more or less) "What do they mean when they say 'in your own words?'. Do you have your own words? I've been using the same ones as everyone else."

(I can't google the exact quote for that line. Ironic, really.)

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I thought the dwarves/giants thing was originally from Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century.

And I'm all for imitation of structures - I don't see why using "just as...so..." should be bad at all (although it's a bit archaic for, say, an informational brochure).