Politely Dealing with Plagiarists

I have a recent dilemma that is fan fiction specific and did not wish to glut up any of the threads in Yack Fest with it.

To fan fiction writers: Have you ever had your work plagiarized and what do you do about it?

No, I don't want to hear any whining non-fanfic authors that "all fanfic is copyright infringement, anyway" or any of the other standard crap we deal with. Eat a sock.

It is actually a widespread problem fan fiction writers because we don't make profit and have no legal protections and are doing unauthorized derivative work. We have only our works and our names.

Right now, I am having trouble figuring out if I have been straight-up ripped off, or, if, as the author of the work that is like mine said, it is a matter of coincidental ideas.

I have been straight-up ripped before. There was one story I did in my first fandom that was straight-up copied from a fansite in which the fanside creator screwed up the formatting and the person who copied my fic didn't even fix the bad formatting before reposting it under their name. To tell you the truth, I got more angry over that than in them taking my story. They took it LAZILY. If you steal from me, steal with style, dammit.

What I am dealing with now is with someone in one of my current fandoms whom I became aware of when they left a review on one of my stories. They reviewed saying that someone had directed them to said story because they just posted something that was similar. They came along to say that my writing was better (always nice to butter the toast) and that they did not mean to make something so similar and they swear that they hadn't read my piece before.

I clicked on their name, read the story that had a summary similar to mine. I was expecting just a few themes and ideas to be the same because we both dealt with a particular event in the canon. What I found wasn't something that just had a similar theme and ideas: There were scenes that were almost (not quite, but almost) carbon copies of my own. I mean, very specific.

In my (earlier) story, I wrote of one character encountering the ghost of a dying character (in a canon/fandom with the "can't live without you" thing, the exact trope-name of which I cannot remember ) and reaching out to them when they were fading away, feeling themselves fading away, and immediately waking up from the dream and getting back to business.

The author's story featured the same thing. The only differences were that mine took place just slightly earlier in the sequence of events and featured the characters losing feathers/fading into motes of light.

In my story, what really hammered home the "I think this person is lying and came to my fic to review it to try to deflect suspicion" was that after the ordeal was over, one character finds the other taking a bath and starts making jokes at the expense of the yaoi fangirls in our fandom. I mean, my having that and the other author having that is just too suspicious to me.

Which makes me wonder why they were stupid enough to draw my attention to them by outright reviewing my fic. It could have been deflection (hoped I'd be a nice person and tell other people not to mess with them), but... uh... Did they think I couldn't smell rat? Their writing style speaks to me of a YOUNG author (most of my fandoms contain more people younger than me than my own age or older).

On one hand, I really am a nice-type and I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt on just having coincidentally similar ideas, which doe happen sometimes. Or maybe they'd read my story a long time ago and forgot completely about it and had my ideas leak into their brain without remembering where they came from?

I told them in a review of their story / PM exchange that it's up to them whether or not they want to take down their story, that I thought it had promise if only they got rid of the stuff that's almost identical to mine.

And they P Med me back asking me to tell them what parts were identical.

And... I didn't reply because I'm facepalming. My dark side wants PM them back with a "You have to BLIND not to see those parts!" (Especially since I pointed them out in my proper review of their fic), and my light side... is kind of curled up in her little introvert-ball of "maybe if I ignore them, they will go away." And, well, coming here to ask for help.

Bottom line: I suspect this person ripped me off and is trying to play nice-nice because I'm well-known and respected in the fandom, but I don't know for sure that they didn't just "copy" me on accident. I really want to handle this with grace and style, but I also don't want to make myself a sap.

Has anyone here had a similar situation to share and some advice?

edited 8th Dec '14 2:52:09 PM by Shadsie

I would be furious if this happened to me, and you're very right to be concerned as well. Start pulling out the bits that you believe are lifted from your own work—ideally as a side-by-side screenshot, so it's REALLY clear to them and other people, but just copy/pasting the text into a normal document would work just fine as well.

The same situation/event from canon is all well and good, but you specifically mentioned that parts of the text and even the summary are far too similar to yours to be coincidental.

They asked you to explain why you think they're plagiarizing. You go ahead.

edited 8th Dec '14 3:36:55 PM by Sharysa

You mean an actual child? Then there's no way of publicly confronting them that won't leave you seeming like a total dickhead. If you're a big name in your fandom, you could end up with other not-so-nice people dogpiling this kid.

Taking it to P Ms is definitely the right approach. What wrote is a good idea, but just make sure you remain calm. There's nothing to be gained from swearing at an 11-year-old (or whatever).

This is a distinct possibility, too.

From your description of events, it sounds like you've handled it pretty well so far. Just remember... at the end of the day, it's only fan fiction — it's supposed to be fun, right? If you find yourself getting stressed about this thing, just shrug and move on.

I didn't mean an actual child, more like... "teenager, probably." I am in my 30s and do video game fandoms, so I know I'm like the odd old decripit porch-shouter.

The person P Med me saying the had changed some things in their story around. I haven't re-read it yet, as I just sort of want to ignore this. They seem to be handling things with class, so it's good to leave well enough alone.

And, if they did copy me are are only ashamed they got caught - at least they did it with style. They didn't just copy-paste, they actually try to make (from what I saw) the story their own. This alone (on the chance that they aren't telling the truth) makes them less "some jerk that broke into my car" and more in the "Lupin the Third class" in my eyes.

So it's like an adaptation? A crazy idea, perhaps, but seeing he's obviously a fan of yours, why not trying to coach him up, developing together the thing into a remade AU of your original story, and helping him develop into a man with his own ideas? Then again, that might be more effort than what one is reasonably able to pull for a stranger in the Internet, but...

Well, that puts things a lot more into perspective. If you already copied the text before the changes were supposedly made, take a look at the fic again when you can and see if they've changed things.

If not, then do the "screenshot/copy-paste" comparison.

If they have, whether the changes are good/neutral or bad pretty much depend on the author's skill. And it'll probably be weird/awkward, going on the teenaged-author assumption, but I'd prefer bad but genuine writing attempts to plagiarism. You can't get better if you don't try writing your own stuff in the first place, after all.

I had to deal with this kind of thing AGAIN.

This time, it was a bit different and easier to deal with. A buddy alerted me to a fic that looked suspiciously like one of mine. Same summary (a canon character quote, so it's hard to fault them), but the entire first half of the fic looked like it was copy-pasted from one of my one-shots and the language was dulled down a little in an attempt the author made to "make it their own."

I reviewed saying "I could have sworn I wrote this fic already" among some other things... (nice things, actually... more on that later).

... you see, the second half was very different from the story the author had ripped from. It's like they took my fic and wrote an alternate ending to it. An ending I liked. I mean, I actually thought the latter half of the fic was a cool idea (that I thought could be explored more!)

I did actually tell the author this - that I liked the alternate take. They noted me, admitting to me that yes, they had read my fic and were "trying to change it enough to make it their own." They offered to take it down or to credit me and I said they could go ahead and keep it up as long as I was credited for inspiration - because I liked the alternate take at the point when they actually started to write their own content. I added that "fanfic of fanfic" is a thing, that people create entire universes that way, that I've done that before (I once wrote a Legend of Zelda fic based on someone else's fic with permission) but that original authors are always to be credited in that.

The thing I am left most wondering.... does the particular fandom just attract young copycats for some specific reason? I'm in a lot of fandoms... (mostly, I'm "too old to love Nintendo, but I do anyway). I've seen copycatting here and there, but it doesn't seem to be usual or frequent - and is often called out when it happens. However, in the Kid Icarus and Kid Icarus Uprising fandom, though very tiny in regards to fan fic writers (it seems like there are more fan artists and people who "just like the games" ) there seems to be an awful lot of plagiarism and general copy-catting. If I'm not being "borrowed from" without permission, it's a friend of mine, or some other well-known fandom author. Sometimes, some of us just have coincidentally similar ideas, but the amount of really blatant "I read this very specific thing / idea / paragraphs of text before in another fic" seems to be kind of heavy in that particular fandom.

Last night, I looked in on a fic chapter that was just transcribed dialogue from Uprising, word for word and while it was a setup for future chapters apparently... it was word-for-word...

It can't just be that "youth is attracted to this game and youth is unoriginal." Can it? I want more good in this fandom besides just the few good authors I already know.

edited 10th Mar '15 12:47:27 PM by Shadsie

Small fandoms tend to have an even bigger problem with plagiarism, owing to the fact that there's a lesser number of sources to steal from, which means that when you do steal from somewhere, it's really blatant.

Nothing is original.