Stuck on a scene? Just plagiarize!

[ElectricBlue]

The above paragraph is very close to what I said in my second post, which made absolutely no one happy. I have an opinion on plagiarism that’s different than other posters! That’s totally unacceptable! I must agree with everyone else! I must apologize for having had a different opinion!

Just to be very clear, the Lit policy on plagiarism is explicit:

Content Guidelines

We DO NOT publish works of any type featuring the following content: Copyrighted material for which the submitter is not the owner of the copyright, or for which the submitter does not have an explicit license from the copyright owner to publish the work at Literotica.

Furthermore:

Intellectual Property

It is strictly against our terms of service for any Literotica member to publish any work which they do not own the copyright, or have other legitimate rights to publish. If you believe that someone has published one of your works without your permission, please contact us with details so that work can be removed from the site, and the user can be warned or banned.

Plagiarism has a definition in law, so it does not matter what you think it means. This is not about opinions, it is about the defined meaning of words and fundamental writer's ethics.

You still do not acknowledge what you did was wrong.

And for all those that think I had an unreasonable stance on this matter, read the last words in the policy extract above. The site takes plagiarism seriously, so should everyone else.

The irony is, you were warned about this by one of your own editors, yet you still went ahead, and you crowed about it in one of your Writer's Notes posts in the Feedback Forum (which everybody else appears not to have read, but guess what, I did). So not only did you steal another author's words, but you were scum to one of your own editing team. You should be ashamed of yourself, yet here you are, not gone, still thinking you're the victim.

 

[jaF0]

Fine. My opinion doesn’t matter. I’m an easy person. Whatever. That was the only story where I used another author’s words. I’ll not do it again.

I don't think there was enough used to matter.

 

[djrip]

still thinking you're the victim.

Victim of his own drama, maybe, since no one forced him to do anything and a very simple fix was available. Feeling bad was not necessary, editing the copied lines was.

I don't think there was enough used to matter.

Multiple sentences is definitely enough. But the Spillane thing would be fair use - intended to be recognized as a reference/ homage to the original, reinforced by being in a Spillane style story in a Spillane event, and if there were any question, an attribution would take care of it.

 

[XerXesXu]

The problem with your response is that you still seem to think that a normal person would have been 'happy' with your responses. Having watched from the sidelines, I don't think most reasonable people would have been happy.

I'm a 'normal and reasonable person' and I was happy with his responses for the reasons he gave.

I don't belong to the 'My plagiarism, good, your plagiarism, bad' set. In the real world, the only test is whether, taken as a whole, the new work is transformative - as was Shakespeare's.

A variation on 'Get out of your bedroom' would be 'Get out of the Academy'. See how easy it is to produce transformative work.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Interracial sex, the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rockies (The team and mountains), Denver Broncos. A romantic weekend with hubby in the mountains. A romantic weekend with hubby at the beach in California. Writing dirty stories. Reading dirty stories. Experimenting in self-gratification when hubby isn't around. Eating out, dancing, coming home and making love. Good good, good friends, and good times. UM, some other stuff I guess as well.

What about you? Any interest outside pestering me? I know, I'm the top. You realize, Cole Poter wrote that love song about me, right? You're the Top and I think him for it.

You said think him for it, not thank him, ha ha, what a writer.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Victim of his own drama, maybe, since no one forced him to do anything and a very simple fix was available. Feeling bad was not necessary, editing the copied lines was.

Exactly. Makes you wonder why jaF0 resurrected the thread. Fanboy, maybe?

 

[jaF0]

^^ Reading the post will explain.

 

[djrip]

^^ Reading the post will explain.

There was never any need to apologize. Just to fix the issue.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

There was never any need to apologize.

Not to any of us here, at least. To JCMcNeilly? Probably. But there is some new information here though. This is the first time he is openly saying he doesn't consider his actions to be plagiarizing. He never explicitly said that before. Well, good for him.

 

[8letters]

The man himself! Hi 8!

Hi djrip!

In my opinion, the whole kerfuffle should have been handled with one simple fix - edit the few copied lines so they aren't copies anymore, or reach out to the original author and get permission to use them. Either would have been all that was needed.

I don't think that would have been satisfactory to people. When I said I was going to take the story down (a much bigger step), only one person said anything positive about that.

I don't think it would have been that simple of a fix. How different would the new lines have to be? Could I continue using terms from "A Girl Named Mitch"? I didn't want to spend a lot of time rewriting the scene just to get hammered again.

The dramatic pulling of all stories because you were annoyed with a few posters here seems way over the top, unnecessary, and a slap in the face to the many readers who enjoyed your work, of which I was one, and the vast majority of whom never even heard of this forum. On the other hand it's your work and you gotta do what makes you happy.

When I got a couple of comments on "Are My Brother and Sister Lovers?" referencing this thread was the deciding factor in pulling the stories. I felt attacked by people who I considered friends and didn't want to have anything to do with Literotica for a while.

Hope you read this. Hope you reconsider pulling everything sometime, too.

I'm strongly thinking about it. Getting into this thread is a part of the process.

 

[MillieDynamite]

The whole thread has me confused at the moment.

 

[Voboy]

The whole thread has me confused at the moment.

We appear to be coming full circle...

 

[AwkwardlySet]

We appear to be coming

Well, at least someone is having fun

 

[jaF0]

This is the first time he is openly saying he doesn't consider his actions to be plagiarizing.

Based on what I've read, including the comparison paragraphs, I don't think it was.

Perhaprs the biggest mistake was posting the notes thread and drawing attention to it. I find it highly unlikely anyone would have noticed it otherwise.

 

[MillieDynamite]

We seem to be one nut short of a bag full.

We appear to be coming full circle...

 

[Bramblethorn]

Knew he couldn't keep away...

Is Literotica a professional setting? Do academic rules apply to stories posted here? No reader has shared with me that they are upset that I used some sentences from another story.

Yes, they did. Even if you think the authors in this thread somehow don't count as "readers", your own damn editor made it clear to you she had a problem with it. She raised it through private channels first; if you genuinely hadn't understood that what you were doing was widely considered plagiarism, the fact that somebody you trusted enough to edit your stories was raising that concern should've been your cue to think about it and perhaps ask for a second opinion. Instead, you ignored her concern until she raised it here.

Now you're talking as if she doesn't exist and didn't give you the opportunity to avoid this mess. That's shitty and it's not the first time you've misrepresented the facts to put yourself in a better light here.

Those readers who have reached out to me think that it’s all much ado about nothing.

They're not entirely wrong. The bit where you deleted your stories and stomped off leaving a sig message blaming AH meanies was a massive overreaction to a situation that could have been remedied by much smaller steps. You could've fixed it quietly when LSM first talked to you about it; failing that, when it blew up here, you could've just rewritten those sections like you said would be easy to do. Almost everybody in this thread would have let it go at that point.

Instead, you chose to play "see what you made me do".

Note: What I should have done when I started taking from JCMcNeilly’s story was to reach out to JCMcNeilly about it. That would have been the polite thing to do. For some reason when I was writing the story, I thought JCMcNeilly was long gone from the site. They aren't.

Did you reach out to them once you realised that was a mistake?

I went to a public high school and a public university. I took as few English/Writing classes as I could. When I posted my first story on Literotica in 2013, I was a horrible writer. I’ve learned to write as I’ve posted stories. So I didn’t “know instinctively where boundaries are”.

I can sympathise with this, up to a point. I have difficulty picking up on unspoken norms; what's obvious to other people isn't necessarily obvious to me.

But all the more reason to listen when somebody tells you "hey you're violating a norm", quietly and in private, instead of alternately ignoring and lashing out at that person. Even if you think LSM was wrong and that all the people criticising your choices in this thread were wrong, it's bullshit to keep playing "I didn't know people would feel like this" after the point where LSM warned you.

 

[XerXesXu]

But all the more reason to listen when somebody tells you "hey you're violating a norm", quietly and in private, instead of alternately ignoring and lashing out at that person. Even if you think LSM was wrong and that all the people criticising your choices in this thread were wrong, it's bullshit to keep playing "I didn't know people would feel like this" after the point where LSM warned you.

Yes, he needs to grow a thicker skin, and not care about what other people 'think' - who could care and why? However, many people never learn that, never quite grow up.

 

[ElectricBlue]

But all the more reason to listen when somebody tells you "hey you're violating a norm", quietly and in private, instead of alternately ignoring and lashing out at that person. Even if you think LSM was wrong and that all the people criticising your choices in this thread were wrong, it's bullshit to keep playing "I didn't know people would feel like this" after the point where LSM warned you.

Exactly. It's the treatment of his editor that sends this beyond the pale, especially after all of his "look at my great writing team blah blah blah, I owe them so much."

Ripping JCMcNeilly’s content was bad enough (but could have been easily fixed by, gee, writing his own words), but the disdain shown to a colleague who helped give form to his stories, that's unbelievable. That's the truly unconscionable behaviour.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't think that would have been satisfactory to people. When I said I was going to take the story down (a much bigger step), only one person said anything positive about that.

To put this another way: only one person thought you needed to do something as drastic as taking the whole story down. Bigger is not always better.

I don't think it would have been that simple of a fix. How different would the new lines have to be? Could I continue using terms from "A Girl Named Mitch"? I didn't want to spend a lot of time rewriting the scene just to get hammered again.

Go argue it with this guy, who was telling a different story at the time that call was made:

If you look at the comparison, what's from "A Girl Named Mitch" is 10-20% of the whole sex scene. To me, the sex scene is very much an 8letters' sex scene. And the sex scene is just a half a page of a seven page story, which is in a different category from "A Girl Name Mitch".

It doesn't matter. If people feel I crossed a line, I crossed a line. It wouldn't be hard to rewrite what little is from "A Girl Name Mitch", but I'll take the story down instead.

I guess this is Schrödinger's plagiarism? Simultaneously such a tiny thing it's unimportant to the story, and so huge it's easier to just delete the story. If the concern really was that people might not be satisfied with the changes... well, there's an obvious place you could've sought feedback on that.

 

[XerXesXu]

Exactly. It's the treatment of his editor that sends this beyond the pale, especially after all of his "look at my great writing team blah blah blah, I owe them so much."

Ripping JCMcNeilly’s content was bad enough (but could have been easily fixed by, gee, writing his own words), but the disdain shown to a colleague who helped give form to his stories, that's unbelievable. That's the truly unconscionable behaviour.

One has to laugh at that (particularly coming from EB). Since when is it 'truly unconscionable behaviour.' to disregard editorial advice with which one disagrees? You'll notice in threads in AH, people seeking advice announce in advance that that's what they'll do. No one expects otherwise.

A little confected hyperbole here, perhaps.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Exactly. It's the treatment of his editor that sends this beyond the pale, especially after all of his "look at my great writing team blah blah blah, I owe them so much."

Ripping JCMcNeilly’s content was bad enough (but could have been easily fixed by, gee, writing his own words), but the disdain shown to a colleague who helped give form to his stories, that's unbelievable. That's the truly unconscionable behaviour.

Do you get the felling, maybe, just maybe, the horse has died and you're still whipping him? Just saying, we get it.

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

Can you just feel the love in here tonight?

 

[ElectricBlue]

One has to laugh at that (particularly coming from EB). Since when is it 'truly unconscionable behaviour.' to disregard editorial advice with which one disagrees? You'll notice in threads in AH, people seeking advice announce in advance that that's what they'll do. No one expects otherwise.

A little confected hyperbole here, perhaps.

Not really. The guy has made a big thing about his great team of editors and beta readers, and how much they contributed to his stories, but when one said, "Mate, you can't do that, that's blatant plagiarism," (gave him good advice - several times - and strongly suggested he fix it), he went on regardless.

Which is why that editor wrote the original post, because they were obviously disgusted and chose to out the shitty behaviour.

Don't conflate your feelings about me with what actually took place in this instance. It seems to me that you've not read all the threads that are up on this issue. Don't be like the other prick, who tried to make this all about EB.

I don't know why so many people are giving the guy a hall pass, frankly. But someone raised the dead thread, and the facts don't change just because time has gone by.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Do you get the felling, maybe, just maybe, the horse has died and you're still whipping him? Just saying, we get it.

I didn't resurrect the thread.

8L still has not acknowledged any wrong doing, so why is that whipping?

 

[MillieDynamite]

Not really. The guy has made a big thing about his great team of editors and beta readers, and how much they contributed to his stories, but when one said, "Mate, you can't do that, that's blatant plagiarism," (gave him good advice - several times - and strongly suggested he fix it), he went on regardless.

Which is why that editor wrote the original post, because they were obviously disgusted and chose to out the shitty behaviour.

Don't conflate your feelings about me with what actually took place in this instance. It seems to me that you've not read all the threads that are up on this issue. Don't be like the other prick, who tried to make this all about EB.

I don't know why so many people are giving the guy a hall pass, frankly. But someone raised the dead thread, and the facts don't change just because time has gone by.

I've read the thread ad nauseam. Many of us are disgusted, many don't care, and yet we keep going and going. It's the Energizer Bunny thread about stealing work. We didn't like it, and he did it, and he felt bad that we didn't get he considered it a compliment to the original writer. He was ripped, and he answered the rips, but his answers weren't accepted. He took it down but didn't apologize, continued to defend himself, we responded, and so on, so on, and so on. Infnitum, infinity, never-ending. It's a love story, a hate story, and it's the oldest story. I fucking don't know. And goodnight, sweet prince.