where the writers are

plagiarism

  • Plagiarism? I Dont' Think So!

    October 30, 2009

    • I had a bit of a scare this morning. I checked my blog as usual found a comment on my “Origin of the Grim Reaper” bloggery from someone named Robert Weniger, who said: You Plagiarist. I posted the exact words and you copy/pasted it from my website.Um . . . What??I love WordPress and all the statistics and information one gets! Besides email addresses from commenters, wordpress notes the IP ...
  • How Writers Protect Their Work

    August 25, 2009

    • In nearly every class or seminar I’ve ever taught, and with many of my clients as well, the question of copyright comes up, mostly in the context of How can I be sure no one steals my work? Despite one obscure author’s recent claims that Stephenie Meyer plagiarized her novel, this does not happen very often — and when plagiarism does happen, it usually involves the lifting of entire ...
  • Still Hot But Smiling

    July 29, 2009

    • Let's not dwell on the heat, which is all-consuming, distracting... oops, there I am dwelling. No, it is just here, it is only heat. Enough.The niceness of the day is summed up by both a lovely new review on my Amazon UK page and by the astonishing fact that I sent three flash stories and a poem to a lit zine yesterday and they'd like to publish all of them! Well, very nice. Will post the links ...
  • This Day

    July 17, 2009

    • Ok, so first, on this day I was born, yup, my birthday. I like birthdays. I don't have a hang-up about age, it seems to me that life gets better and better, and I have no idea what the year might bring but I look forward to it all! This is a quiet birthday, which suits me fine, that's just where I am right now. It's been a hell of a year, ups and downs, so a quiet day making birthday cupcakes and ...
  • A few things, some nice, some not so nice.

    July 8, 2009

    • I am back at work in my cool cellar/study, just the right temperature when it's 27 degrees outside. Since the lovely news about the Binnacle Ultra-Short comp, I have done a u-turn on my previous decision to stop writing flash fiction. The universe seems to be telling me that I'm pretty good at it, and I do love writing flash, so I'm going to keep on doing it.I started today by writing a 25-word ...
  • Remedy for the dark side

    May 28, 2009

    • This is still hard to write. A week later, and the anger and distress I feel at having one of my stories "stolen" and published under someone else's name is still raw, still cuts deep. The fact that, several days after this revelation it was discovered that this person, a former writing colleague, stole an idea from a mutual friend of ours and once again passed it off as their own and ...
  • Ms. Dowd Sort Of Regrets

    May 26, 2009

    • I have plagiarized. Once.And it was inadvertent.That can happen. At the time, I thought I had changed my own prose enough so that it didn't read like the sources it came from but I hadn't and also, I had no original sources -- only the ones I offered in my bibliography. It was many years ago. I was desperate for money and very young (this is not a defense, but a description).  Assigned by a ...
  • Authors' Copyright, Digital Plagiarism, and Web 2.0 Part Deux by John Parker Oughton

    March 28, 2009

    • Continuing on the theme of my previous blog -- what is the significance of the interactive, next-generation Web (AKA Web 2.0) and phenomena such as the "mash-up" to authors' contradictory urges to share their work and yet retain some control over it?In the old Web -- the kind envisioned by its creator, Tim Berners-Lee -- information was essentially static and one-way.  A creator of a ...
  • Authors' Copyright, Digital Plagiarism, and Web 2.0

    March 28, 2009

    • For writers, the apocryphal Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" has come true. The Web and the many social networking groups it has spawned make it remarkably easy to share samples of our work, market it, connect with fans, and sometimes agents or publishers. But the less-pleasant edge of this sword cuts into copyright and intellectual property.  The fluidity and speed of ...
  • In the land of . . .

    December 6, 2008

    • Was discussing internet plagiarism with filmmaker Paul Boczkowski of Longtimers Productions, and he emailed the below. I found it cogent with an intriguing idea. Liked the writing style, too. It follows: ``In the blogosphere plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery. ``On the information superhighway, just about all art is clip art. If you put it out there you gotta accept that it ...