Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Plagiarism
May 21, 2012 | Monday | 35 Comments
First, via Katiebabs and KatiD on Twitter: More from Plagiarism Chutzpah! YA Author Sarah Cross has a guest blog about plagiarism and how it sucks a lot (which it does). It's not a bad post, as it discusses the different types of plagiarism. But it's a guest post on Kristi Diehm's site, The Story Siren, where plagiarism occurred last January, and was discovered last month. Unfortuantely, this guest post, if you're keeping score at home: 1. includes as a description the exact thing Kristi Diehm did when she lifted content from fashion bloggers Beautifully Invisible and Grit and Glamour. 2.…
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April 28, 2012 | Saturday | 118 Comments
A few of us have been joking about making plagiarism bingo cards so we can check off the predictable responses to any discussion of plagiarism. It is jaw-hang depressing to see the same repeated responses, patterns and excuses, but we really could fill a bingo card at this point. AnimeJune rounded up a perfect list of responses to the clarification and comments at The Story Siren's page, and I want to focus on this one: 7. Plagiarism is not less wrong than BRINGING UP PLAGIARISM Clearly, this blogger tried to go the "silent but deadly" route but misjudged the amount…
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April 23, 2012 | Monday | 197 Comments
In a series of links that dropped my jaw, made me shake my head, and feel a boatload of "Oh, No," here's an eyeopening series on how to catch someone stealing your content online, which was posted today by CuddleBuggery after Katiebabs saw an anonymous link on this older post on plagarism. The follow posts are from January 2012, and I'm not sure why the book blogging community wasn't aware of it until now. Kristi Diehm, better known as The Story Siren, was allegedly caught lifting articles about blogging and making minimal changes to them for her site. Bloggers B from Beautifully…
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February 24, 2012 | Friday | 97 Comments
Since January there's been coverage of plagiarism on Amazon, with folks self-publishing works in the public domain or copying works by other authors, slapping their own names on them, and selling them. NPR and FastCompany covered the problem in January regarding plagiarised works - including in one case a word-for-word copy of Dracula - posted as "erotica" - which tends to sell rather briskly. One issue is that even if Amazon responds and removes the content, the onus is on the author who was plagiarized to seek any damages. From this article at Appazoogle: Just to give you one more…
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August 15, 2011 | Monday | 42 Comments
It takes a lot of balls to copy someone’s work word-for-word. It also takes a lot of balls to pass that work off as your own. But it takes a whole pile of balls to copy a book nearly word-for-word and both change the main characters’ name to “Edwards” and “Bella” and change the point of view from first to third. Because making it TwiFic makes it all better, right? Lucky for Cynthia Eden (except not at all) that’s exactly what someone did. A fanfic writer named “misconception76” took Eden’s story Deadly Heat and turned it into TwiFic. And the…
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November 18, 2010 | Thursday | 65 Comments
You know those people who will say, in two different sets of inflections, “I’m sorry, but….”? There’s the “I’m sorry, but…” where in you apologize sarcastically for having a negative opinion, and the “I’m sorry, but…” wherein you apologize half-assedly and then defend yourself in the same breath, thereby negating your apology. Enter Judith Griggs. Well, she’s reentering. She’s kind of refusing to leave the stage at this point and someone needs to carry her off. (ETA: It appears she’s taken down her website entirely. There is a a Google cache, the text of which is what I’m addressing here.)…
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November 04, 2010 | Thursday | 58 Comments
I have this short write-up of links that are all feel-good and awesome with coulis, but first, let’s have some hot smoking asshattery. From many people comes this amazing series of links wherein Monica Gaudio, a writer and something of an expert on historical cookery, was plagiarized by a magazine, Cook’s Source, whose editor, Judith Griggs, believes the internet is public domain. So you don’t have to pay people whose words you steal, and moreover (wait for it… wait for it…) Monica should be grateful that Cook’s Source reprinted her article without permission or payment. No, really. Cook’s Source lifted…
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June 11, 2010 | Friday | 22 Comments
From Phyllis, the greatest video on plagiarism ever made, ever. Hit the CC button to make sure captions are turned on, unless you understandGerman. Norwegian! I stand corrected! My bad! (Someone, quick, hook me up with Norwegian curse words!)
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August 21, 2009 | Friday | 36 Comments
There’s a great deal of “If you liked…” recommendations for romance readers. And most of the time those recommendations are much appreciated - especially when they come from the online community, which is hellaciously well-read. But thanks to Amazon, we have a new category: If You Didn’t Like This, How About Plagiarism Instead? Leslie Kelly noticed that because her book Slow Hands is one of the free Harlequins being offered as part of their 60th Anniversary, it is frequently in the top ten downloads for Kindle. Nice, right? Well, not entirely. There’s one review that lists an alternate title that’s…
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June 24, 2009 | Wednesday | 46 Comments
Plagiarism is still newsworthy, especially when it comes time to take a look at the side by side comparisons. Seeing comparisons side by side isn’t just eye opening, it’s also kind of stunning when you consider that IT’S THE INTERNET AND YOU’LL GET CAUGHT FOR THE LOVE OF CRAP. First up: Chris Anderson‘s Free, the sequel to Long Tail, which describes how acts of generosity in product distribution may create profit. RUH ROH. Seems Anderson lifted material from Wikipedia, as the Virginia Quarterly Review accounted in detail. Their research was compounded like an orgasmic interest rate by Ed Champion who…
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May 18, 2009 | Monday | 76 Comments
Yesterday Nora Roberts and I presented a morning panel at the Washington Romance Writers May meeting and talked about plagiarism. The point of our discusion was simple: “If We Don’t Talk About It, It Won’t Go Away.” If you attended the session on plagiarism at RWA in San Francisco, you might have a sense of the general themes of the discussion. As Jane said that afternoon in San Francisco, the attitude toward the topic itself, from discussing it to reporting it to dealing with the aftermath, needs to change, and it needs to change now. Within romance and within publishing…
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January 13, 2009 | Tuesday | 266 Comments
Isn’t it enough that you people set out to destroy her career and almost caused her death? In case you don’t know, which I know for a fact you have been told, Cassie Edwards suffered a massive stroke due to the stress you idiots put on her. I hope you can live with yourselves knowing what you did almost cost this woman her life. You have deprived her grandchildren of their grandmother. You have caused a lot of innocent people much heartache by your actions. Everyone is blaming you and your cronies for what happened. Not just her fans, fan…
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January 08, 2009 | Thursday | 42 Comments
From the “You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding Me” department comes this story via GalleyCat: spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch admitted to plagiarizing a story by another writer, Candy Chand. In the NY Times article, Walsch is quoted as saying In a telephone interview, Mr. Walsch, 65, who said he regularly gave 10 to 20 speeches a year, said he had been retelling the anecdote in public as his own for years. “I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me,” he said. Pardon my French, but Bull Almighty Fucking Shit. I’ve got the…
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April 18, 2008 | Friday | 19 Comments
Jennifer Blake, Roberta Gellis, and Bertrice Small led a session that, unlike many of the fan-friendly sessions, was silent, with notetaking, serious faces, and a great deal of attention. Their session, in a word, was outstanding. My notes are below, which don’t really follow a well-transitioned structure (or any structure for that matter) but let me tell you – these ladies rocked this session like damn and whoa. Roberta Gellis provided a point by point explanation of copyright law in the US. A few facts to chew over: Until 1978 individual states determined their own copyright law, and since then…
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