If this has been discussed before I apologize; the search came up empty.


So today I came across this author's note at the beginning of a first chapter:

Quote:

A/N: I know I said I was taking this down because I feared it would be stolen, but I needed more feedback. I still have it posted on my own site, and I will be posting it here and on my site as well.

followed by twenty chapter's worth of story and all of one review saying "oh, you re-posted. Weird to see this pop on and off" which makes me think the whole thing was posted in one go. This time.

Now, first of all, I see this every now and then, but never on stories that would be worth stealing. This one, too, is okay; it has its moments but also has its moments of "yeah, keep practising". It isn't so bad that it would stop me reading, but there are entire paragraphs I skip because I don't care enough, and when I thought about reviewing I realized everything I had to say was criticism.

On the upside, I considered reviewing. There are plenty of stories where I wouldn't even know where to start.


Admittedly, I haven't actually been in the business of reading stories online for very long -maybe since April or May of this year. Yeah.- but the stories that I flat-out adored have been few and far between... and none of those authors have expressed any concern about their stories being stolen. So question number one is; how come only people with mediocre stories worry about this?

Question two; what are they worried about? If they aren't making money off their work, what's the harm? I mean I understand being annoyed upon finding your work stolen and someone else getting all the praise; that would bug me, too. But to be so scared of it that you don't post your work in the first place?


And lastly, I guess I'm wasting half a thought on wondering what made them think it couldn't be stolen off their own website.

Even if you aren't making money off it, it's still plagiarism. I'd be down right pissed if someone took credit for my work, whether it was a news article, a college paper, or a fanfic. Some people may just be overly paranoid or have such an inflated sens of their abilities that they think someone would steal their fanfic.

I know I'd be pissed if somebody else was getting credit for my work. But since there's no money, and nobody knows it's really you, one might as well think "Well, now I get to see the opinions of ANOTHER site, one I didn't originally put the fic up on."

Damn right, Grumbles - plagiarists are opportunists.

But if a story IS very popular, they'll be hampered by the concern "What if I get caught?" which basically lets us know that they know it's wrong to steal but don't actually care.

Anybody will like mediocre stories if they're all that's to be found.

Based on the reports at places like adultfanfiction.net, folks are blatently stealing stories all the time, but I have to say they don't seem the type to be put off by a "Please don't steal" message.

They obviously just need to post "Theft-free zone" signs at the start of every fic.

I've had one of my stories stolen--a short story about World War I. Some high school kid printed it out and turned it in as theirs for a creative writing class. The problem is, the kid had an approximate reading level of second grade, while the story contained a fair amount of medical terminology (it was about mustard gas). The teacher knew right away that the story was plagiarized, Googled it, and e-mailed me to find if I knew about the story being used (I didn't). Hopefully, the student failed that assignment.

I keep spotting people on FF.net who steal the contents of actual published books and just change names to match their fandom then pretend it's AU.

Makes you feel kinda sick inside, doesn't it?

Long time ago (and we're talking a good ten years, at least), I wrote what was probably the longest story I've ever written for an online e-zin. The thing was probably a good two thousand words long, took me roughly three months to write, and burnt me out so badly that I didn't write any more fanfic for close to a year.

Oddly enough, after all this time, I still get e-mail from people who are reading it for the first time and like it. When I do, it always takes me a minute to remember what story they're talking about.

A while back, I got an e-mail from a woman I was friends with when I was in the fandom telling me that she thought someone had ripped off my story and published it as their own. She gave me the URL, and damned if she wasn't right. Except she'd screwed it up by rewriting it for another fandom, but she hadn't bothered to change the dates in the story (which, at the time I wrote it, took place in the future).

I wrote her a civil e-mail saying that I was aware what she'd done, that the story was mine, and while I was honored she considered it good enough to plagarize, I'd appreciate it if she took it down, as I still had the original copy. She replied by saying that there was no way I could prove it was mine, that it was a totally different fandom, and that she'd come up with the whole thing herself.

So I marshaled a few people from the fandom I originally wrote for and had them write her. Not harass her, simply write her and say they'd read the original, they knew who wrote it, and that they didn't appreciate her plagarizing a story someone who had put so much time and effort into.

Last time I checked, it was gone, though she could easily have just moved it to another site or hosted it on her own site. But it was the principle of the thing-I basically wore myself out writing it. It's probably the best story I ever wrote online, and having someone latch onto it annoyed the hell out of me, because I'd done all the work of world-building, and all she'd done was go through and replace people's names. She hadn't even bothered to give them the personalities of the characters they were supposed to be.

I still have no idea why she chose that story. Except, I suppose, that it was in an older fandom that a lot of people don't know about, and she figured no one would notice.

That'd be quite the bumper issue.

You can't build a world in two thousand words, but you can sketch the blueprints for the reader by biasing the narrative. There are a lot of words with a lot of different connotations in the English language, and a lot of things that get described with the same few words and phrases. Choose different things to talk about and different words with which to describe them, and you colour the reader's view of the world without having to have the characters themselves do the talking.

I have the feeling that the reason mediocre writers are worried about their stories getting stolen is because they're worried they could never come up with a better idea in the future. They write their story and think, "wow, this is the best thing I've ever written!" and somehow that gets twisted into "this is the best story EVER written!" in their minds, because they honestly can't imagine doing better.

I honestly think it's just ego, plain and simple. In the Batfandom I've encountered something similar--people convinced that their OCs are so awesome that DC is going to make them canon. There's even people paranoid that DC will steal said fan character and not credit them. Generally, the more paranoid they are, the less the character is actually worth stealing.

Yet I have seen mediocre stories and characters get stolen before--usually by writers who are just as bad as the original writer and see the work as worth taking. Those instances only increase the general paranoia and the cries of DONT STEALLL.

Think they worry because they read other stories where people scream "PLZ DUN STELE MY STORE" and after five odd months of story-hopping, they finally decide to make an account and try out this "writing" thing themselves. And boom goes the dynamite.

You mean it just snowballs until everybody thinks it's just something you put at the beginning of your story, like a disclaimer?

Why, that's entirely possible. :/