Plagiarism At WritingUp.com Continued...

Yesterday's post was concerning some of my work that had been stolen and posted at a writing site called WritingUp.com. Either the link I gave you has been taken down or the fact that you have to register (which I had to do in order to comment there) has made it impossible to see what work I have that was plagiarized, I'll post it here. After all, it's MY writing.

Someone named NewEra (he has been banned from the site, thank goodness) posted this...

What is a Karmic Soul Mate?

One of the most interesting things about life is that out of all the people
in the world, a few fortunate ones will touch our lives in a special way and
leave lasting impressions. One such person is your karmic soul mate.
While
other soul mates come into your life for intimate reasons, not so the karmic
soul mates; they are the ones who come into your life to teach you something
about yourself or help you with a particular task.
While there are usually no
sexual relations with this person, there is still that bond, that closeness, the
feeling that this person is pretty darn special. It may be a special friend,
co-worker or even a member of your family, but one thing is for sure, without
them your life would not be complete.
A karmic soul mate comes into your life
for you to teach them something or to learn something from them. A companion
soul mate comes into your life for intimacy and/or childbearing.
A karmic
soul mate comes into your life intermittently while a companion soul mate
relationship can go on for years.

That is a bit of what I learned about
karmik soul mate......
Feel free to visit, you know you're always welcome!NewEra

That is the exact same words from my column last month. Notice how he spelled karmic with a K at the end and didn't even attempt to change anything to look like his own words? Gimme a break.

I'm not sure what WriteUp.com is all about. Supposedly you can make money off of either people clicking on your article or something. Still foggy about it. Reminds me of Themestream years ago when you would do anything to get people to click on your article to make the proverbial two cents a click.

I found out that my article was being plagiarized by a Google Alert. I can't stress enough to put your articles, what have you, in their alert system so that you can see exactly where your articles are being published.

After I found out, I was livid, as you can imagine. Someone called his bluff, though. Whoever it was, I thank him/her, but am presuming it's a her. She wrote:

Submitted by Wabbit Huntur (2507) on Fri, 2006-02-03 11:04.
What do I think about Karmic Soul Mate?
I think it was written by Dorothy Thompson & you copied it from here: What is a Karmic-Soul-Mate?
But it's an ezine article so it's not theft?Read their usage TOS here and see for yourself.

» reply

And so I replied:


Wabbit is right. This is
Submitted by thewriterslife (8) on Wed, 2006-03-08 00:27.
Wabbit is right. This is the author of the article. This is blatant plagiarism. I am a syndicated columnist. Every website that hosts my articles clearly understands that my name and bio must accompany my articles. This is outright theft and the administrator has been informed and if action is not taken to remove my article, my lawyer will see to it that things are taken care of.
Dorothy Thompson
» reply

Okay, I'm big and bad, but I was angry. Pissed.

Wabbit wrote back:

Submitted by Wabbit Huntur (2507) on Wed, 2006-03-08 00:37.
NewEra has been banned. When I find plagiarism I point it out. They usually play dumb but NewEra flat out lied. I don't know why any of the pages can still be seen. If you click the link at the top of the page for his blog, the page should come back empty.
How did you find this page?
I've taken it upon myself to police the site as well as one person can. I HATE plagiarism. I quickly typed up a rant about the very topic earlier today. I was so mad!
I'm sorry this has happened to you and can understand why you are upset. For what it's worth, it's against WritingUp policy to copy anything from anywhere & paste it here even if author is given credit.

So there you have it.

I am a syndicated columnist, which means my articles/columns appear all over the web and in places I'd never heard of. But, they are all credited to me, including my bio (I know because I have a google alert for all of them). The purpose in letting any website owner have it to post on their websites is a promotional tool to sell my services/books. But, sometimes it comes back and kicks you in the ass like it did me last night.

If you are a website owner, please adher to the instructions of copying someone else's work. Most do...but then, someone will come along and break all the rules. The owner of the article is put through needless stress and you're in a good position to be sued.

This is copied from Dictionary.com:

plagiarism
n 1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work 2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own

My advice? Don't do it.

Oh, and a heads up...Wabbit posted a link so you can see where your pages end up, too. It's called Copyscape. Here's the link: http://copyscape.com/ .