Someone Stole Your Story. Now What? - Comments

I appreciate you posting something like this! I now know what to do.

I know this is super late but: When in doubt, print it out! Print out your entire story (yes, I'm serious!) and pay to mail it to yourself. Never open this envelope. It's your poor man's copyright. The post date stamp is your evidence against plagiarism.

Never thought I'd have to deal with this... just had three of my stories plagiarized on Wattpad glad this article was here so I knew what to do.

Thanks so much for posting this. Plagiarism is the worst thing I can think of as a writer, and I wish it never happened to anyone ever, but I know it does unfortunately. I'm glad there are resources like this article for people to consult should it happen to them.

@ HorusTheAvenger
Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and leave the information as is and see if I can add yours in. But I'm not willing to move ff.net to my "Okay" list because clearly they aren't taking initiative to help users.

And under the story when you report it, they clearly say to email 'abuse@ff.net', which is obviously communicating inaccurate and incorrect information to the users.

If users of the community have to communicate this information, clearly their staff isn't doing an appropriate job assisting users with plagiarism.

@dru is beautiful

The information is in the Terms of Service link accessible at the bottom of every FFN page (https://www.fanfiction.net/tos/).

Agree with you 100% the information needs to be more easily accessible. Current process is complicated and difficult. But therein lies the problem.

If FFN administration were more responsive about abuse reports in first place, user-formed help groups like ours wouldn't need to exist. As it is, the best we can do is try to reach out to people who have been plagiarized and try to advise and guide them on most effective methods to get the stolen stories taken down.

-H.A.
The Anti Plagiarism Investigation Reports

One of my friends was plagiarized on a website called Booksie, but the website did nothing for two years until I threatened to make the situation more public. Another site I was plagiarized on was extremely prompt in deleting the user and the work she stole. I regularly search for my most popular stories through Google i.e. the ones with more readers. It is frustrating to note I have been plagiarized by other users, though, as the only stories I have that have been plagiarized are hidden by Mibba due to being NC-17 stories.

@ HorusTheAvenger
I'll try your new information, but ff.net should really communicate that information to the masses themselves. Now it just looks like they are deliberately trying to make the process complicated. As of 2/14/2014, I have sent 4 DMCA takedown requests and none have been honored or responded to. Most recently was this year.

Greetings,

Just wanted to update something about your comment on fanfiction.net:

"If you are plagiarized on fanfiction.net, your best bet is to contact the author and plead with them. This site has not responded to any of my DMCA complaint requests or reports on stories. As far as I know, they are all still up even though they violate the site's own rules about real-person fanfiction."

This information might be a bit outdated. As recent as Feb 9th 2014, the site does seem to respond to DMCA complaint requests. We just had a successful case here where the user was banned:

https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/124913/106397370/1/Report-FFNID-5480704-KimKlaroline-Vampire-Diaries-active-Resolved-Account-Deleted

FFN admins are still slow on responding on non-DMCA reports however.

For anyone who has been plagiarized by someone on FFN, please note DMCA takedowns should be sent to copyright@fanfiction.com address and not abuse@fanfiction.com

-H.A.
The Anti Plagiarism Investigation Reports (TAPIR)

@ The Blind Banker
I have done that. There's no way to guarantee your story will be found by search results, but I do a Google search on my story "Milk" about once every two months to see what comes up.

@ Carpe diem;
You can do a Google search for exact wording to see what comes up. Obviously some people have a ton of work and can't do this with every piece. I've been notified and come across it by accident. I know others have been notified when their work is plagiarized by someone who saw it.

How would you find out that someone is plagiarising your work though?

I don't think this has ever happened to me, but I was wondering if there was a way of knowing? Like can I paste some of the text into google and see what comes up?

So far from what I know, I've never had this happen. I do though know, on deviantArt, you can set your text as copyrite, so that if someones tries to copy and paste, it will not allow the action. I have done that to all my writing work on there. I'm not well known, but I still am scared that it might lead someone to get interested a bit too much and decide to slide it as theirs. I fear for it more so though with my art, since pictures are more widely spread(and lots of my pictures do not have my signature :P)

On here, as you've already stated, we come to the head and talk to them. I think a good idea would be to look into something like on DA. A setting in our stories that shuts off the 'copy' action. :)

Thank-you for the article :)

I had my three oldest fan fictions stolen and reposted on Wattpad (by two separate users). Wattpad were prompt in taking two of them down, but I ended up contacting the author of the third one myself. Lucky for me, she wasn't a fighter. She took it down straight away.

I've also found those same three works posted on this website Scribd. I first found them several years ago and reported the author (if this is the same site from my memory) and found it again a few weeks ago. The author has been removed, but all of his posted works - every last one of them stolen, by the looks of it - is still there! They have a very official form you can fill out to have your work removed, but I wasn't serious enough about my thirteen-year-old self's work to want to give them so many of my personal details. I would, however, be interested in hearing if anybody else has had experience with this site before.

And as a side note, I tell everybody who will listen - please, please always leave your work where you originally post it. The moment you take it down, you lose all evidence that the work was ever yours. You really do need those date stamps.