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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Plagirism

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

We received two "fiction stories" recently, and you might suppose that this means we will have something to put in Captain's Log, but such is not the case. The problem was that these were not really stories in the sense that the Author had created something entirely new. What they were was a process of taking the work of someone else that has been published, and then simply changing a few words. Change some "humans" to "aliens", relabel the location as "planet X", change the weapons to phasers and disruptors and such, but otherwise do nothing really creative. In all seriousness, had we published one of these stories, and the original author had found out, we could have been sued (even if we published the story out of ignorance, i.e., we did not recognize the story that had been converted).

The author of the submission, we are fairly certain, did not see what he was doing as "theft" of someone else's work, but it is, and he/she would doubtless have been sued as well, which might have taken the sting out single-handedly through ignorance destroying our company (again, it would have depended on whether or not the original author had someone point out the story to him, and truth to tell there is some chance the author might let it pass, but that it is not something to bet your company on).