Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Possible plagiarism on fanfiction.net?

Beat me to it, Carol. I was just idly wandering through the Stopping Plagiarism site (excellent resource btw) and spotted it, too.

Here's her excuse:

ETA: I've been trawling back through previous entries on the SP site and, honestly, it's worth taking a look at some of the excuses offered by plagiarists. Makes you shake your head and wonder what their parents and teachers taught them when they were growing up.

I like this one:

Eeesh.

LabRat

Wow, that is strange. It sounds like they have no concept of what plagiarism is. But how can they think they worked on anything if they simply copied a whole story and pasted it on another board? They didn't even change the names of the characters with a global replace?
Even so, I'm sad to see someone declare they won't write ever again. They had good taste to pick good stories. Actually, the whole apology was so effusive, I'm skeptical (but I'm a cynic). My bet is they try it again under another pseudonym. Most first timers would be in denial first.

Artemis

One would think that people would have been taught in their Language Arts classes (for whatever language) that taking someone else's work and slapping their name on it was stealing - they wouldn't have gotten away with it in school, so why do they think they can get away with it in the rest of their lives?

It also means they haven't read any of the guidelines ff.net has on what is and is not allowed, nor any other archive guidelines.

Luckily, such blatant theft seems relatively rare in fanfiction - in part due to self-policing as evidenced here.

I'm stunned that the 'author' posted there. Still, all the plagiarised stories are gone, which is good. I just posted a note of thanks to the comm and the mod on our behalf.


Wendy

I had to go back to 2005 and read some of my 'old' cases with Stop_plagiarism. It made me laugh. Oh the good ole days...
The lameness that some people can display is overwhelming!

Stop_plagiarism has posted a follow-up to the original post and investigation, just summing up findings.


Wendy

It is good to see it dealt with. The motive however just weirds me out.

How people can think that it's okay to post somebody else's work as their own, and not view it as cheating, is a mystery to me.

At least Google (and vigilant fans) are making it harder to get away with.

PJ

Thanks for posting the link to the follow-up Wendy. It's nice to see that it is dealt with. Looks like Shin Kalel never did any original writing at all, just slapped new titles on other stories. How there is any satisfaction in that I simply can't understand.

Artemis

What's really depressing and chilling is the attitude/excuse given by this plagiarist - which, reading the stories on the SP website, are not at all unusual.

This idea of "Well, you see, I didn't actually have any writing talent, so I couldn't write or post any stories of my own, so I just figured no one would mind if I took other people's and posted them instead and I'm really surprised to find out that's considered a bad thing to do."

I mean where does that kind of thinking come from?

LabRat

LabRat, the answer is the lack of proper teaching. Sadly, this has become common in the USA.

Artemis

Out of the 15 or so term papers I've graded, I've had about 5 or 6 that were plagiarized and a couple more I gave the benefit of the doubt to.

I get to grade about 25 more; we'll see how those do :p . And these were 2 2 page papers each, so 4 pages total on two different topics.

Fun times...
Carol

This is infuriating. One of my college research papers was plagiarized word for word and then afterwards, the person bragged that they got an A plus when I got an A minus. The nerve of some people.

I would have love to have seen some of the comments all of you put on fanfiction.net! And how in the world could someone not know what plagiarism is? Maybe they might not know the official name, but surely they know what stealing means.

As I was reading this again a thought struck -- wonder if some of the cases aren't writers at all, but in their group, it's cool/common to have stories on ff.net. Since they can't write their own, they pick something else and put their name on it. The story's not the important thing, and there's none of the satisfaction *we* have in getting feedback on our hard work -- but what is important is that the person has now posted *something* and is thus one of the cool kids. The peer pressure is focused on participation, not originality. The number of reviews is a status thing, so numbers are all that matter, not content.

Okay, it's hard to imagine fanfic-writing being that cool <g> but if all your friends are doing it...

PJ

I agree, Pam. Plagiarism of a fanfic makes no sense to me, either. At the same time, it's one of those things that I keep trying to understand. I mean, I can understand stealing someone's essay to submit for a class. You want the marks but you don't want to do the work. But stealing a fanfic? It's not as if it's going to give you the feeling of a job well done - nor is it going to benefit you financially or in terms of easy marks. So why bother? There must be some other motivation - like peer pressure. But I wouldn't have considered writing fanfic as the 'cool' thing to do.

But then, a lot of things about the web completely confuse me. For example, why do people claim to have insider information about a political candidate or a reality show outcome or almost anything else when they don't? Or why do people feel free to be mean just because they don't have to sign their own name to a comment?

There has to be a reason for these things, but for the life of me, I can't understand it. I'm sure it would make an interesting study.

ML

I took a web studies class in grad school, and we talked about this all the time. There are so many things said online that we would never say face to face but because we have a level of detachment (the computer) separating us...some how this lessens our thoughts concerning the consequences of our dialogue. We went off on tangents a lot about how our whole society is finding new ways all the time of detachment...email, text message...

Maybe if we had more face to face conversations, we'd all be a little peachier online. I bet psych departments are writing whole papers on this kind of stuff...

The only reason I can think of so far for stealing fanfic is a little fame or glory in a comments section...which is sad that you need to steal it, but ok, it's a *little* geeky cool that someone thinks fanfic is worth all that trouble...If that makes any sense.

Cheerio
JD

Silly thought, but it seems backwards to me that people would plagarize fanfic to get glory among their RL friends when so many true fanfic authors don't even tell their RL friends that they write fanfic because they feel too geeky.

Elisabeth
who has always been forthcoming about her geeky hobbies