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

[thewayupward.livejournal.com]

It would be really funny if your entire friends-list except the person who actually ripped off your stuff commented on this worriedly saying, is it me? In the interests of um making this dream into reality, lemme just say - is it me? ;_;

PS. Most times it'd probably be me - 's never happened yet, but I'm terrified it's going to happen someday. I swear, I have this completely worthless capacity to get words stuck in my head the way other people get song stuck in their heads. Upside is, I can quote vast swathes of poetry; downside is every time I say something I have to reread it to make sure I haven't accidentally quoted someone I just spoke to a couple hours ago, or something.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, 'tain't you:)

I think anyone who loves words is in danger of unconscious plagiarism- we've got so many of them swirling around our heads. Walter de la Mare has a story about how, entirely by accident, he largely misappropriated a friend's poem about an owl.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

[Looks over her journal in a frenzied state]

I think everyone thinks it's them. It's not me, is it poliphilo? I cannot imagine that you would be writing about--as burkean's entry put it--"copulation at a bar", LMFAO. But if there is anything I have written that strikes you as something you thought up first, even if the words are changed, do let me know and I will cite appropriately.

What a mess! I dealt with this sort of thing on Diaryland once. Someone on LJ took an ENTIRE poem and published it as theirs. I went ballistic. It wasn't even that important. I don't know what it was, but I felt extremely violated. After that, I never posted anything that I considered even mildly worth literary merit.

Really, it's not that I am not longer a great writer [laughs] I am just paranoid.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No. it wasn't you. Of course it wasn't! :)

A whole poem? that's serious plagiarism. I have left myself very open to this. I've posted quite a lot of "literary" stuff without even putting my name to it. I guess I knew I'd get ripped off sooner or later, but I suppressed the information.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

It's very difficult to guard against this, though, but you -can- and you should. You could add a little blurb about ownership or even look into this.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll consider my options.