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]

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).