Thursday, April 07, 2011

Officially good enough to be plagiarised

Some people have a lot of nerve.

A few days ago I got an anonymous email through Literotica’s feedback system (thanks, whoever you are) asking if I was posting chapters up on DeviantArt.com under a different username. I followed the link and found a gallery with the first eight chapters of my Succubus Summoning 101 series.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen my stories crop up elsewhere on the internet. It’s the nature of the beast. If you post something up where everyone can see it, it’s inevitable the same work will be reproduced elsewhere. As long as my name’s still on the top and no-one’s milking it for cash, I’m usually content to turn a blind eye. Often it’s extra advertising and the stories are already available for people to read for free online anyway.

This is the first time I’ve ever had someone else try to claim my work as their own and that’s a whole damn different ball game. When they’ve already picked up fanart for my original characters you know this shit has to be sorted out damn quickly. Obviously, I couldn’t resist leaving the odd sarcastic comment or three, especially a “Please tell, I’m curious to know myself”, in response to their answer of “All will be revealed in time,” when someone asked what Verdé’s plans were.

Sadly, DeviantArt gives page owners the ability to hide comments, which rather spoiled my fun somewhat.

Fortunately, I also frequent the Monster Girl Unlimited forums, where a good proportion of the members also have DeviantArt accounts…

I’m not sure whether DeviantArt terminated the account after it was reported, or the plagiarist de-activated it themselves once they realised it was impossible to maintain the pretence anymore. Either way it was gone by the time I got back from work.

I wonder how they thought they could get away with it in the first place. One google search to the wrong place by any of their fans would have blown the deception wide open. It’s a little mortifying to think they managed to get eight chapters up without anyone actually noticing, and that the chapters hadn’t really picked up many comments either. Take that knee in the soft and squishy parts, ego. Big time infamous succubus writer, ha!

Oh well.

I suppose I was lucky. It was only a case of someone trying to impress their circle of friends on an art site. Other writers from Literotica are still struggling to get stolen work pulled down from amazon’s ebook store.

3 comments:

  1. Whatever their motive, it's damn infuriating to have your work stolen. While it's a shame you'll have to leave vengeance to karma, at least your integrity is still solid. Hopefully that will be the last time!

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  2. I was surprised they were able to get away with it for so long. I guess that little series isn't as well known as I thought :)

    I was lucky it was on DA rather than in Amazon's marketplace. Those fights are a lot more of a pain in the ass to get resolved from what I've heard. More reason to get that series brushed up and uploaded as a complete ebook.

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  3. I'm guessing it's well known in each circle, just hard to know how many from Literotica visit DA and vice versa. Still it's a favorite series of mine, so I like others will be looking forward to the polished version.

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