It does not happen that often–maybe once a year, maybe less–but from time to time someone likes my Temporal Anomalies stuff so well they copy it, and then try to pretend it is his own work. This time it was the Donnie Darko analysis, showing up in a Blogspot blog, so I had to register to post a comment. Here’s hoping that whoever found what he wrote interesting will find me, although really, do people read blogs? I’m usually surprised when someone says he reads mine–or she, as happened yesterday. I expect it would be barely interesting to family and friends, barely interesting to those looking for Multiverser product–it’s just too much a combination of trivia and incidentals to have much interest.
Meanwhile, I was exhausted last night, and apart from rousting myself to launch the boy to school I tried to get as much sleep as possible. At the midpoint–when I rose for the school launching mission–my wife complained that I’d been tossing or something most of the night, disrupting her sleep, and I was still quite tired, but more rested than I’d been. I was not feeling well most of yesterday, but am considerably improved today.
On the other hand, I’ve a lot to do if I’m to finish all of Monday’s and Tuesday’s work in one day.
–M. J. Young
December 4th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
First off, I am very sorry to hear that this has happened to you. At first it appeared to be the work of a spammer but, upon closer inspection, it appears to be the work of a human, but the blog appears to be long defunct.
My advice is to file a DMCA notice with Google and get the work removed. If you need help with that, just drop me a line and I’ll do what I can. The stock letters are on my site if you need them.
Let me know if I can help in any way!
December 5th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Thanks, Jonathan. Your site looks very good, and I’m betting that you’ve got something like Google Alerts for words like Plagiaraized to let you pick up posts like this quickly.
At the moment, I’m going to treat the blog “theft” as an advertisement for my site–I’ve managed to post a comment to it with the link to the original, and I’m guessing that anyone who enjoys the stolen material will want to go from there to the original site. In that sense, what he took is not much more than a reviewer’s excerpt, and that he took it suggests it’s a positive review.
It would be different if there were no way to post the credit, or if the blogger shows up sometime and deletes it.
Thanks for the offer, though; and I’ve started publishing electronic books, so if I start to see them stolen, I’ll be looking for your help then.
–M. J. Young
December 6th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Actually, I use Technorati watchlists for this. But I do use Google Alerts for other things…
Do keep a few things in mind though. First, search engines do not follow or credit links in comments, generally speaking. This means that, as far as Google goes, that copy is equally original to yours.
Second, even many humans don’t read comments.
The end decision is yours and I will support it, but just don’t forget that commenting is, at best, an imperfect advertisement.
I hope that you’re doing well!