Plagiarism

[Yman67]

I recently have been accused of plagiarism by a plagiarist. I had a story removed from Literotica because of this plagiarist. I'm very unhappy with him and with the webmasters of this site. With him for stealing my story; the webmasters for unilaterally deciding I'm a plagiarist and removing the story.

The story of which I speak was titled "Monster Tentacles." I wrote the story in 1994 and posted it to the "alt.sex.stories" page of the Giganews bulletin board under the user name Smalltoe10 and the title "The Green Tentacles." Yes, that long ago. Since I maintain computer files of everything I write, I decided to update some of my old stories from the newsgroup era and post them here. "Monster Tentacles" was not the first, but it was one of the first.

The plagiarist who posted my story as his own appears, from my investigation of him, to be a prolific writer. He has self-published several books. The last 10 days or so I've found maybe 50 stories all over the internet that he CLAIMS to have written. My imagination is weird enough I don't need or desire to use another's person work.

I began SERIOUSLY writing erotica after I retired. I write this to warn others of you out there you need to find a way to copyright your work. I understand why Lauren and Manu try to protect writers and I appreciate it. I just think they should have contacted me first before removing my story. I am very upset and very angry. That "author" better hope I don't catch him at again because I will hunt him down and sue him. I already know his real name.

Sorry this is so long.

 

[sr71plt]

Yep, they (it's Laurel not Lauren) should have contacted you for your side of it rather than just assume the story is someone else's, not yours. It's on them if they didn't. Even if they did, though, it would be very difficult to sort out who owns what without someone holding and producing a formal copyright. This is why I publish them first myself to the marketplace in a pen name connected enough with my name here that I am able to point out to site owners I published it first.

You're post, by the way, would get greater play in the Authors' Hangout than here, since it's not really feedback on the story content.

 

[emap]

Bummer, the problem is unless you go to an actual court of law where it's who has the oldest version of the story either typed out or on a document of whatever sort, the site has to go with who posted here first.

Seriously, unless you have links to older postings of a story and can prove you are the one who posted it in the first place, or the dated document files that shows you typed the story, there's nothing anyone can do. That is how the law works, prove you wrote the story or it's not yours.

 

[sr71plt]

Bummer, the problem is unless you go to an actual court of law where it's who has the oldest version of the story either typed out or on a document of whatever sort, the site has to go with who posted here first.

Umm, no. You don't get to a court of law at all in the United States unless one party holds a formal copyright document. The courts have no interest (just as this Web site isn't going to put any research into judging itself--and neither does Amazon) in trying to figure out who had it first. What will cover you, as I said, if you don't hold a formal copyright, is to be able to point to it in an earlier posting date than the other party can in an author name believably connected to you. If Laurel/Manu had this waved under their noses, they'd probably accept it. If they just deleted it without giving one of their authors a chance to show ownership, they've been precipitous.

The danger here is that anyone wanting to get rid of an Lit. author who's doing better here than they are could just post some of the author's stories around under a different name, blow the whistle, and watch the Web sit knee jerk erase the targeted author.

 

[lovecraft68]

As far as the real law goes, its very difficult, unfortunately to prove it was yours first and even if you could, its a lot of money and could take forever to get it to court.

I am surprised Laurel would so easily take another's word though, especially if you could have provided older documents or links to prove your side.

But this happens all the time here and in some sense we're all asking for this to happen when we post something up here for free on the huge pirate grocery store of the net

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Having had one of my stories show up on another site, and having heard more than once here that the courts don't uphold the law as regarding unregistered copyright, I'm motivated to get formal copyrights on my stuff.

I've glanced at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/ . Has anyone here gone through the process of anonymously registering? Anything I should know?

Does US copyright have any real effect on pirates in other countries? (The guy who stole Becoming Marie was clearly operating overseas, and while the site he posted it to instantly took it down when I did the DCMA thing, I'm guessing it's not always going to be that easy.)

How in general are people catching violations? I had a fan tip me off about the theft (and it was obvious which was the original, not only based on dates, but the idiotic thief changed the title to something engrishy and nonsensical). But that's going to be unreliable. Periodically Googling for key phrases in stories seems like it might work, have people had success with that?

 

[sr71plt]

Having had one of my stories show up on another site, and having heard more than once here that the courts don't uphold the law as regarding unregistered copyright, I'm motivated to get formal copyrights on my stuff.

I've glanced at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/ . Has anyone here gone through the process of anonymously registering? Anything I should know?

Does US copyright have any real effect on pirates in other countries? (The guy who stole Becoming Marie was clearly operating overseas, and while the site he posted it to instantly took it down when I did the DCMA thing, I'm guessing it's not always going to be that easy.)

How in general are people catching violations? I had a fan tip me off about the theft (and it was obvious which was the original, not only based on dates, but the idiotic thief changed the title to something engrishy and nonsensical). But that's going to be unreliable. Periodically Googling for key phrases in stories seems like it might work, have people had success with that?

First, the courts do uphold the law. The U.S. law was purposely written to keep this stuff from bogging down the courts. The law states that you have to hold a formal copyright to get a court date. So, there are no U.S. laws on copyright that the U.S. courts aren't upholding. Be realistic, though, who's going to go to the expense and effort over going to court over a dirty story written under a fake name that you valued at zero by posting it to a fee-use Web site like Literotica--when you'd have to go to court under true name (and publicly prove your connection to the fake name)?

I have copyrights, but not using anonymous names. As you imply, proving you were an anonymous name would so difficult it wouldn't be worth the effort. (You don't have to pay the fee to copyright on each story, by the way. You could lump them all together as one collection, as many as you like, and cover them all under one filing.)

Yes, U.S.copyrights hold overseas--through the Berne Convention--it's just as hard to get any satisfaction of taking erotica there that you gave away for free on a free-use Web site. The money value of that becomes zero in court. They hold with any country that is a signator to the convention. The United States very belatedly signed the convention--and signed it specifically to be able to pursue its copyright cases in other signator countries. And then it very cynically required, by U.S. law, the holding of a formal copyright (rather than the Berne Convention's "established just by writing it" definition of ownership) for a U.S. court to take on a copyright case.

The Internet is so massive and such a sieve that most thefts probably aren't caught. One of my publishers subscribes to a service that hunts them out and reports them. Last month over 2,000 cases of my GM erotica stories were tracked down and DMCAs sent--the publisher did it; I don't have to. (I have no idea how many pirated copies were taken down then, but I trust as many more have been put up--I combat this by publishing my stuff to the marketplace first and taking my earnings from them off the top--doing it this way also establishes the first date of appearance as being mine).

 

[PervOtaku]

Being the internet where anybody can post anything, this is of course to be fully expected. Most amateur writers and artists (especially of porn themes!) don't even have the resources to get registered copyrights or trademarks on all their stuff.

You see a lot of watermarks on art these days to prevent theft, though the cropping off of artist info on reposted webcomics remains a problem. For stories it's harder I'm sure, though with sites like this it's easy enough to find the one with the earliest date on it and demonstrate ownership of that author account. Also, a lot of plagiarists steal from multiple authors, which can be shown as a far more likely scenario than multiple plagiarists each stealing one story apiece from the same author.