Stop Stealing My Fanfiction Already!

Plagiarism is wrong. It is not our friend. It is bad. Stop doing it now.

The following rant focuses on a certain Inuyasha fanfic of mine, but the sentiment goes for any other of my fanfics that get plagiarized. Read on!

Ok, I know you Inuyasha fans really dig my fanfic "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", and 99% of you are of the honest variety: Even if you post fics on your websites, you link to my fics and clearly credit them as having been written by me, The Queen Of Swords. You are my friends. I love you for giving me and my work such fine props and I thank you from the bottom of my heart! You are absolutely the best!

Then there are the, shall we say, less honest Inuyasha fans. They take other people's fanfiction and post it on their own websites or on sites like Fanfiction.net or Fanfics.org (the latter has no mechanism for reporting plagiarism; very irresponsible) and claim themselves as the author.

I found another of these thieves today on Fanfics.org. The person's handle is "IY Geek Gal". The only way to alert others to the fact that she stole my work and called it her own was to join bloody Fanfics.org, then post a review on the story. Mind you, you can't post reviews without joining. Yes, I was angry enough to join just to smack this person down.

It's a 35 chapter story, each chapter averaging between 12 and 20+ pages. Imagine the writer hours that took to produce. My hours, my creativity, my effort. Now this person (and others) think they can just take it and post it elsewhere and smack their own byline on it. Why do they think they can do that?

Here are some excuses I've received in the past:

"I was just giving YOU props!"
Oh really? 'Cause I didn't see my name anywhere. I saw just you being credited as the author. (The person in question even wrote an intro to one of the chapters saying it had taken her days to write it. Gee, I had no idea it took that long to download a story from my site and upload it to another site. Get a faster ftp client, honey.)

"You are such a bitch!"
Sometimes, yes, but that's beside the point. That's right, folks, apparently creatives have no right to complain when other people steal their work. How dare we? Following that line of reasoning, I think I'll self-publish "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and say I wrote it. Then I'll call J.K. Rowling a bitch for not understanding how I was giving her props by stealing her work and calling it my own.

"It was posted on the Internet, so it's public domain!"
Wrong-o, Mary Lou! "Publicly accessible" and "public domain" are not two ways of saying the same thing. Public domain means the copyright has expired. Why do I think fanfiction, which is based on the characters and settings created by another author/artist, can be considered copyrighted work? Any original portion of a work that has been committed to a physical form, including electronic, is copyrighted to the originator. You do not need to apply for a copyright, according to international copyright law. I do not--repeat, DO NOT--claim any ownership to any degree of characters and settings created by Rumiko Takahashi, or any other author whose work I've based fanfiction on. However, the original characters and settings I created around them are copyrighted to me. Not for the purposes of commercial, for-profit publication, but from the standpoint of their being my own original work. So is the entire story. So, just because it's posted on my website doesn't make it fair game for thieves. Even works in the public domain must be credited to their creators.

Bottom line is this: I am not flattered when you steal my work and call it your own. In what way is that flattering? Everybody else plays nicely in the sandbox and doesn't steal the other kids' toys. What's your problem? (I'm addressing more than just today's offender, IY Geek Gal.) Later: I found another one: Queenofdarkness posted it as her story on Anime Spiral.com. Read her responses to some of the reviews. She's really playing the part of the person who wrote it. Some of her readers actually note that they saw the story on my site, but think she posted it there. OY VEY!

So, how can you, Dear Reader, help me eradicate plagiarized versions of my work? Thank you for asking!

1. If the forum in which the plagiarized story has been posted has a mechanism for reporting plagiarism, use it. Tell the moderators who really wrote the story (The Queen of Swords) and where it has been posted since it was written (http://www.queenofswords.com). Give them the name of the offender, of course.
2. Email the offender and give them the same author/author's website information and ask them to remove the story from the forum you saw it in and any other in which that person might have posted it.
3. cc me on that email: queenieATqueenofswordsDOTcom (man, I so hate those spam bots that troll for email addresses in blogs, don't you?)
4. Above all, don't be a jerk about it. Just the facts and realizing they've been caught with their hands in the cookie jar are usually enough to make the offender back down. Even if they don't, the moderators of such forums as Fanfiction.net are extremely vigilant. In fact, I haven't seen "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" posted there in a coon's age. I think they're onto it.
5. If the person won't back down, and if there's no official mechanism for reporting plagiarism (i.e., if it's posted on a personal website), unfortunately there's not much that can be done about it (unless my loyal fans organize and blacklist the offender wherever and whenever they can until that person removes the story. These are the circumstances under which you may be a jerk, and I will love you for it.)
   

Can you tell this is a pet peeve of mine? Actually, it's a peeve of all creatives. Amethyst Angel once found the art she used to use to represent herself on her website posted somewhere by someone who claimed they'd drawn it for their girlfriend. *sigh*

Having ranted so, I realize I need to go back to my website and make sure I'm giving appropriate credit where credit is due. I think I've been slacking off on that. My fault. I will rectify any omissions this weekend, when I'll have more time to work on my site. So many more fics to post...so little time.

Anyway, as for The Queen of Swords Webpage of Rather Silly Things, all fanfiction posted there was written by me, unless otherwise noted.

Rant mode: OFF