Learning From My Past - Please help- I think the internets broke

I typed out this super long-winded (kinda bloated), half whiny and ubber-angry post to start this topic, but it timed out and got lost...ARRRRGGG! It is almost certainly for the best though since my pontificating would have detracted from my original intention to plead your assistance in spreading the word of my new cause; to save our intellectual property rights in the face of the monstrous tidal wave of an internet populous seemingly oblivious to the sanctity of proper literary credits/citations.
I know that it might sound naive, but I honestly believed that most people would never, could not possibly, intentionally attempt to pass off plagiarized writing as their own unless under extreme duress (e.g. a college student when the clock has wound down and a term paper is due in an hour picks pieces where he/she can find them to make a crappy, but hopefully passable, hodgepodge forgery to eke out a "C" for the course - GUILTY). I never imagined that something that I wrote, something I wasn't all that impressed with even as I received more praise and attention for it than I thought I deserved, would be laundered over the internet so often, and for so long that when I finally became aware of even one serious plagiarized copy I would be sucked into a fetid vortex of insanity and unabashed entitlement that I am still hoping was a nightmare I am going to wake up from. I spent the day wading around, trolling, in a digital mind f*ck universe of criminally co-opted poetry rife with the expectations the digi-people praise THEIR masterpieces. FML.
It wasn't like my piece got plucked from some unmonitored website, or stolen from my facebook page, no, this poem was published...in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book in 2001. I don't want to boast - really I don't like calling attention to myself, which I suppose is part of the reason that my poem has now become a cluster f*ck of varied incompetence and arrogant "adjustments" that virtually no one knows who it belongs to, and several Q&A sites list the author as "anonymous". Very few people in my REAL life know that I authored that poem...it's really personal and it about a dark time in my life that I am not ashamed of but I never felt it was reasonable to brag about it. I am breaking my silence now. The final straw came when I found my poem, maimed and utterly ruined by misspellings and obvious grammatical incompetence so vast I would have to do some serious leg work to keep my degree if someone ever mistook that hack job forgery for my original, and rearranged to suit the agenda of the "writer" who intended to use it to champion a cause I am adamantly opposed to. After having been told to "Back off, c**t" and "Prove it, b*tch" when I politely requested that several of the forgers either cite the work or remove it (many have been up for several years), and facing the dissolution of my demented overly optimistic belief that people generally do what's right even when they can get away with doing wrong, I only reached my tipping point when I saw whatever little good this poem had done it the world being siphoned off by shamelessly indifferent ignorant leeches who were seemingly no less bothered by the immorality of their wrongdoing than I am when I step on a snail on my way to my car.
I have never been more angry, or disgusted, nor have I ever felt more compelled to start talking about it with people and start acting to stop it. I have b*tched for years about the classmates that get away with plagiarizing things from the internet in class assignments, but this kind of thing is very different. The people who are taking creative writings of others and posting them online aren't turning them in for grades to pass, or making copies to keep in their binders because they are so enamored with it they can't stand not to have a copy on their person at all times - no, these were almost all incidents of people intentionally misrepresenting a SOMETIMES slightly altered version of an otherwise wholly plagiarized piece of literature and offering it up to the "Almighty Internet" tribes of snowflakes and trolls to feed some unbelievably twisted thirst for attention and praise - and THEN, when confronted about their misdeeds fell back into unbelievable callousness and sometimes self-righteous indignation tinged with entitlement that no human could possibly manage to maintain were it not for the curtain of dissimulation and distance that the anonymous internet allows people to hide behind. I know that not EVERYONE is guilty of this villainous thievery, but my greatest fear is that as books become increasingly rare and digital print floods the market it will become increasingly more difficult to keep the people who honestly don't know that they can't "borrow" written works from doing on a broad scale some of what I saw today...the more something is passed around amongst and between the barely literate and largely uninterested masses the harder it will be to convince people that just because it's not a physical forgery doesn't mean it is any less criminal. I don't think that many people would argue, even now, that a majority of people understand that not everything that is on the internet is, or should be, free.
I suggest that anyone who has a dog in this fight step up their vigilance, even by just a fraction, and then tell everyone they know to do the same. I know, for me, whenever I am sent links, or get posts that include poems or stories that I know weren't authored by someone I know directly, or aren't cited, I am going to take a minute and search for the first two sentences...who knows what a waste it might be, or what I will do if I find a conflict in asserted ownership? I certainly don't have a clue, but I feel like I am obligated to actively participate in the preservation of a hobby I have been passionate about since I was a child. I don't make any money from posting my poems, and I don't plan on trying to turn a profit, and that is all the more reason to be more careful to ensure that private works are not treated as public fire sales en route to Twitter and FB Updates - if you are posting your own works on sites like this without any real expectation that it will ever be financially rewarded, then I hope you get angry with me. I hope that you feel agitated and motivated and ready to be a digital vigilante - even if it's only in 2 minute increments and only if the piece lands in your inbox without your consent.. .it's a start. My mom always impressed upon me the importance of sharing and of the nobility of being truly altruistic, but she never said that in order to fulfill those obligations to my fellow man that I had to be complicit in crime - and while I may not have spent the last decade asserting myself and my right to my own intellectual property for fear of appearing greedy and immodest, that is all over as of now. I can't make anyone else feel as I do or commit to act as I am committing, but maybe just talking about it is enough for now...maybe not. Either way I have failed miserably in my attempt to keep this short and I think I am going to have my husband pound the knots in my shoulders( from hunching over the laptop in a full rage for hours) with a meat cleaver before indulging in an extra dose of ethanol based relaxants. Cheers, fellow logophiles and poets! Thank you for allowing me to land here after a long day of hair pulling insanity - I came here to hunt another plagiarist but ended up feeling for the first time today that I wasn't alone in trying to defend these rights. At the very least, I am grateful to have found a pleasant place to read pieces more likely than most sites to be true original works. Bless you for that, dammit, bless you.

(p.s. Please forgive what I can only assume is an unacceptable number of mistakes - particularly of the comma variety - in the above post. I plead temporary ocular focal seizures and general "I don't give a f**k" that are the direct result of the trauma I endured today. I'll fix it later...)

Haha, well that's a rant if I've ever seen one, but I hear ya! If there's anything the moderators can do to protect your work, come to us straight away. Plagiarism is not tolerated on PnQ and if it rears its ugly head, it is penalized severely.

I think I may see if any of my poems have been plagiarized...

:0)

As I told you in the PM, welcome aboard. It is a pleasure to see you again & very happy that you have graced our site with your popular poem by its original author.

I suppose there should some consolation by the fact that your poem reached so many people's needs. I would bet that only a few of 1000s people who loved your poem stooped to steal it.

Thank you for your confidence in us and I hope you will be here a long time.

I feel most welcome here and incredibly humbled. I didn't spend much time looking around this site even though I registered many months ago. I came here to hunt one of those extra adoring fans of mine before deciding that it wasn't worth my time to pursue the issue further, I thought "who would give a rats a** that my over-exposed, tired 'I'm-an-angsty-teenager' marathon poem had been replicated"...at least that person was getting something from it. I thought if I asserted myself I would look like a bully and a heartless hypocrite... geez, Rcachael! Doesn't everyone know that only really detached and wretched souls would be capable of masquerading as an author when they were in facts not! Man, my inner vocalizer (a voice only talks, mine occasionally makes only noise) was way off the mark this time. I came here at first full of rage and left have spent time debating and reflecting with my husband to garner some compassion for the non-author, and when I came back this morning to do what I talked myself out of in December I felt too overwhelmed and claustrophobic to pay any attention to the sub-structure of your digital LOGOS temple. There is much still for me to explore, but I might have skipped over it and simply missed out on an opportunity to reconnect with the adventures of creative critiques that can drive passion to new heights. And I'm pontificating again...at least this time the urge to purge my word vomit is driven be excitement and that is only attributable to the fantastic support and incredible grace of the people who made my inner vocalist a big-mouthed idiot when you came in to fight with me as colleagues and fellows instead of whatever far less desirable personas I predicted. I also hope to be here for a long while, I hope I can be of some use at some point, but I am perfectly contented right now to be politicking and jockeying for a silly (yet looks so exclusive) colored box of my very own!

Welcome again to the site, take some time, explore, and have fun with it.
Btw, thanks for this post. I just found one of my poems altered in a blog post. Probably wouldn't have checked if you hadn't mentioned it.

Welcome, welcome to the site! :):)

Whew! I have a feeling that was building up for a while, Rachael! Welcome aboard the PnQ ship. I hope that what you find here will be much more positive than the event that lead you to discover us!

"I am perfectly contented right now to be politicking and jockeying for a silly (yet looks so exclusive) colored box of my very own!"

I came up with a solution. Get your favorite color vellum, cut a hole the size of your profile, put it onto your PC screen & *poof* you have your very own colored box

;-}

Great suggestion, Larry! The boxes are just "awards," right? Yea, I absolutely should give myself an awrd, I TOTALLY deserve one for "Outstanding Internet-izing" or "Achievement of Self-Appointed Guru/Heroic Activist" or maybe "Honor of Most Magnificent Psychotic Break on Public Forum "(a.k.a. Epic Fail at sounding like a person of sound mind).

Unfortunately my husband did NOT think that super gluing little trophies to my screen was a great idea and has vetoed it - so alas I am still accolade-less. *deep dramatic sigh of resignation*

Lucky for you, most of those "awards" are pretty easy! You just have to:

-Have people pick you as a "favorite" writer
-Write several poems
-Comment on other poems
-Talk in the forums

Ok, so the last two are the easiest, but you get the idea. I don't know if you already figured it out, but you can click on the little pastel award boxes to get a break down of how they are awarded. For example, my silver "D" means that I talk too much, apparently....

Now, I did not read all of the rant, but I hear you. I have had work "SNAKED" before. There are things I wrote all over the internet, not all posted by me and most without authorization or credit. The fact is some people take other works to make themselves look good - pretending it's their own to try and get over. I have a few erotic pieces/poems that have been plagiarized online and I take it, a few of my romantic poems and thesis/ compositional works, also. I don't know what can be done about it, but it is most certainly distasteful and down right malicious, at times.

I have a question for all in this thread:

Without an official copyright, publication, etc., is there any solid way to protect things that we post on the internet? If I found a poem posted elsewhere on the web, would I have any defense except my word? I guess I could screenshot the submission date, or something. Just wondering if people have any more "professional" ideas.

The best information I could find while searching all weekend is on the blog site run by a man in LA about Plagiarism...I'll PM you the details if you'd like. There's a new system for registering copyright notices, but I my understanding is that it might now be quite what they were hoping it would be - yet.

You can register your copyright at a company in England, for a fee. You do not have to register the copyright for it to exist, but, as you pointed out, Sibs, if it is not somehow dated you have an evidentiary problem.
However, any publication that ties into a date works. For example, if you publish the poem here, the presumption is that it was at least written on, if not before the submission date. If it is written substantially earlier, put the original date of writing at the bottom of the submission. I did that when I uploaded several of my older pieces. It is not conclusive, but serves to establish the date you claim protection.
If you don't submit it, you can e-mail it to yourself. In older times I mailed a screenplay to myself before submitting it and left the envelop unopened.
Anything along these lines that you do serves as evidence of your authorship.

Mail it to yourself through the Federal Government mail system and never open the envelope.

Write the date, title, and author on the back of the envelope over the seal.

If you ever have to go to court then there it is un-opened, unaltered.

Ok, so I know I really should edit this post, especially given that I don't remember writing it in my insomnia induced psychosis, but I haven't been able to bring myself to re-read it for fear that I will be too embarrassed to return to this site...so for now I'll just give an update, and my more thoughtful current feelings.

I have been very successful in my attempts to get this poem removed from the sites it was posted to by others. Many sites were very accommodating and pleasant in their responses to me. A few have not responded, a few were a little...less than kind, and a couple have been difficult (I'm being kind). However, in general this process has been much simpler than I thought it would be - I didn't need to send any nasty grams, and only a very few dense legalese packed messages. I didn't need to threaten anyone, or be overly aggressive, which is great because as good as I might be at ranting, my mild nature offline leaves something to be desired in the "ass-kicking" department. Mostly the only action taken was the removal of the content, but a few users found their accounts deleted, or nasty-grams in their In-boxes from site managers none too happy about having to get involved. I will say that none of the users, who I sent individual messages to on each site, did the right thing and remove it or cite it. That was disappointing. All told more than 70 have been taken down, and some sites have added precautions to prevent future occurrences. I have received a great many profusely apologetic e-mails that while very kind are largely unnecessary - it is not the duty of sites to police their users that must sign stated declarations of originality before posting what they are fully aware is not original. The promises to adjust technology to be more vigilant in its efforts to root out potential plagiarisms is appreciated, but I doubt sincerely that it will deter too many from attempting to commit fraud if they are already inclined to do so. I am still shaken by the sudden awareness of my misjudgment of how many people are engaged in content theft, but largely relieved of some of my more... conspiratorial...guesstimations conceived of in the absence of sleep of few days ago. But I have another story to share - one that I left out but has some relevance now, I think.

I dealt with one case of plagiarism not long after the publication of the book. Maybe it should have served as a greater warning to me that something like this was coming, but instead I believed it was an isolated event; one more pitiable than enraging. A 13 year old in Michigan e-mailed me asking if the e-mail address, which was in the back of the book, still belonged to me; the author. By that time the requests for advice or praise of the work had slowed to a few a month, and I assumed she was another in need - that I would have type yet another 'I wish that I could tell you what to do...." reply with as much careful compassion as I could muster. Instead she told me that she was contacting me, at the advice her mother who confirmed that it was the right thing to do, to inform me that my poem, the whole poem, had been published by the Michigan Reading Association's annual "Book" (really more like a heavy magazine). The publication was the result of a statewide poetry/writing contest. She told me the poem was under the name of a 14 year old girl from a school in northern Michigan. She also told me she loved the series, the book, and my poem and was angry and concerned that no one had caught the fraud before it was printed. I had no idea what to do, but figured I should do something. I spoke on the phone with the girl and her mother to confirm details before I called the Association to discuss it further. After their initial shock and repeated apologizing, we began the collaborative process of figuring out what do to. They were a non-profit educational group aimed at supporting K-12 students to increase reading proficiency whose budget came from dwindling state monies. The publication was not for sale or profit, but was a tool used to inject enthusiasm for creative writing into the kids they served by rewarding them with a little localized fame. It was their 3rd such published trophy - there were no digital copies (they had a website...but 8 years has changed much of the internet, as you well know). They were, I believe, terrified that my intention was to bring a lawsuit, but they were as kind, open, sincere and apologetic as I could have wished. The girl who plagiarized it was not taken out and publicly flogged- as some might have demanded - I didn't want that. I asked that they call a parent conference with the principle to discuss this in detail, explain to this child that such thievery isn't acceptable, but I was insistent that this be done as gently, and with as much compassion as was possible . I doubted that she had done this in the interest of achieving rewards - rewards given long after her submission of my poem. I suspected she had turned it in as assignment (this suspicion was later confirmed - the teacher had been so impressed with the poem and the ''turn around" in her work that she submitted it for entry into the statewide contest). Though it was lazy, and wrong, and incredibly bold/stupid, it was worrisome and scary, to my mind, for a child to have chosen to plagiarize something so accessible - especially given the content, and I was very concerned. A child who would chose THAT poem, the only one from a book read by TENS OF THOUSANDS of teenagers all over the nation - the only poem published in that book about one of the most talked about topics on the book's online forums, suicidal depression/cutting, should be a child under careful watch for other signs of being a danger to themselves. They agreed, sent representatives and called counselors into the conference, and though I wasn't there, I got updates. They suggested that the girl be required to write a letter of apology. I told them it would not be necessary. I thought that it was probably traumatic enough for her, but I don't have direct knowledge of her reactions, or of her at all.

The whole experience gave me a chance to develop a feeling about plagiarism of my own work that went unchallenged until this weekend. I felt sadness for the people who connected with my dark poem so intensely that they would risk being labeled liars and thieves by attempting to pretend they wrote it, especially given the public availability of a book that is still selling in bookstores today. If she had been an adult, or had clearly tried to change the poem in ways to make it appear to be original, or had even been the one to submit it for consideration in the contest it ultimately won (which ultimately got her caught) I would have been less forgiving - it would have felt more like fraud than a cry for help. I still could not imagine a world in which people, beyond the few fringe ambiguous "others", would engage in plagiarism so obscenely obvious. Part of me wishes I was ignorant still ignorant of the sad and opposite reality; that the world is full of those willing to "bend the rules", if they can, to further their aims -even at the expense of others, sometimes at the cost of some personal moral code, but always without regard for the (non-monetary) damage plagiarism does the real authors. The part that sent me reeling wasn't truly that my poem had been credited to other people, mostly of blogs that were from high schoolers - it was about me and the harsh truth I was facing and when confronted with I had to reevaluate my own concept of "normal" behavior with regard to cheating. I was forced to accept that , in this backward reality, I was of those ambitious fringe, the weirdos, by being incapable of compromise either of my character or my definition of plagiarism. What was most upsetting was the resulting conclusion of such a reversal of my understanding of the general population: that in a world where originality and creative ownership are fluid concepts and are malleable in the hands of individuals with need to change them, a world where anyone is free to take what they want whenever they want and call it their own, no one would have reason to be novel in their approach to writing, and only a masochist would write and then send it out into the massive grab bag for more plundering. If that was the world I was living in, I would be even less able to trust people than I am now, and that's the antithesis of my current self-improvement agenda. However, a little time, and sleep has provided me yet another possible scale by which to categorize the masses and their acceptance or intolerance of plagiarism. The truth is I don't believe it is as common as I believed when I was manically Googling all of cyberspace, but it is decidedly more so than my overly-optimistic previous belief. I honestly don't know how much or how little people cheat in private, and I think that engaging people in the discussion is still important, but I am less inclined to hold to my more... conspiratorial...beliefs of a few days ago which were precipitated by crisis and manifested in a borderline mind-state. Let's just say that I won't be locking up all of my collected works in a hidden fire safe under my house just yet.

And there it is.

Have you considered taking a job in journalism? Your posts have such personality, they're fun and easy to read.

Glad you're not going to lock up your works and hide them from the world. While providing a thief every now and then with booty to steal, you provide many more people, and many more times over, with the opportunity to read and experience and learn from someone who clearly is talented and has a lot to offer.

I used to scour the Internet looking for my poems but it got tiresome. Toward the end, most of the poems that I found on other sites had my name on them.
It's infuriating but I don't have the attention span to fight it.