Motherfucking plagiarists! I will see your guts strewn before me!

Time. It’s all about time.

In my job, I deal with people of a different culture from my own. They don’t see time the same way I do. This has caused some serious problems here in the office, and this was a banner week, culminating in today’s near-cliche “Five O’Clock Suprise”. You know:

“Um, yeah. We’re going to be in town on Monday only. We’re going to need to have meetings scheduled with Senator X, Congressman Y, and Various Other Important People.”

That’s not the fucking problem. That’s my job. You see, I’m an expert on such things. How I discovered I’m an expert on this subject is… the… fucking… problem.

After the fun and games ended today, I got the bright idea that our office could use a little bit of outside help, namely from a book about time perception in different cultures. I wrote a research paper on the subject once in college, heavily citing a particular book. I can remember the author, but I can’t remember the title of the book. That’s okay, I thought, Google will find it for me.

Well, Google got pretty close.

It found my goddamned research paper. FOR SALE. First damned hit. And the second.

Same title. Same length. Same subject. Same number of sources. I can find out for certain if it’s my paper if I’m willing to cough up $9.98 a motherfucking page plus $20 shipping. From one of TWO separate research-paper purveyors.

Allow me a moment to reflect upon the perfidy of this operation. I’m talking about an Internet service which has stolen my work and is re-selling it so that college students worldwide can plagiarize me. I wouldn’t plagiarize me. I’m not that good. The funny thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen my own work pop up on the Internet.

This time, however, they’re making shitloads of money off of me, not a dime of which I will likely ever see.

At the risk of sounding modest, almost a hundred bucks is a fuck of a lot more money than that pissant little paper is worth, and it’s almost as much money as one would need to buy all the books I cited in the paper. There’s more than one author out there who ought to want these pricks turning on a spit.

I am disgusted. And I’m more pissed than a panther with gasoline on its asshole.

I do know this. I work for a law office. If there is a way, any way, that I can figuratively slide a series of fluorescent light tubes down these motherfuckers’ throats and then kick them into powder I’m going to do it. They caught me at the wrong time. Here’s another time-related term: pro-motherfucking-bono.

(Shaking fist defiantly) That’s why it’s all about time, you bastards. Because I have it, and because yours is about to run out!

(Yeah, right. And I still can’t find the title of that damned book. Sheeeeit.)

Go SofaKing! Kill! Kill! <chanting> punish them, punish them

Het Sofa, what’s the title of that paper? 'Cause I’ve got a final coming up, and I don’t really have time to write it out…

Seriously, though, I hope you nail 'em.

GET THEM! And make sure you post the results. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. Nail the bastards.

I feel for ya, bro. It sucks, sucks, sucks sucks sucks.

I had a lawyer friend of mine help me draft a very strongly worded letter to these fuckers. Seemed to scare them enough; the site disapeared in a couple days, but I don’t think the fuck head who did it was ever punished.

I know what you mean. I’ve had the exact same thing happen. I’ve even seen a couple of my things from this board pop up elsewhere.

It pisses me off, becuase I’ve been working on a novel for a year or so, and I’d love to post it as a work in progress for revisionary feedbacks and comments… but I’m afraid.

And you know, from the teacher perspective, plagiarism is still blatantly stupid.

When I assigned a take-home essay on Brave New World I expected I might get one little darling out of 50 who wanted to save a little time. Instead, I got four out of 50.

A few hints for the plagiaristically inclined:

  • if it isn’t your writing style, the teacher is going to notice.

  • if you’re a burned out, sub par high school senior who turns in a well polished, concise, articulate paper that makes references to the Sexual Revolution, communist China, Pavlovian psychology, and the Catholic church, the teacher is going to suspect something.

  • if you turn in the same essay that your buddy turned in as a research/info gathering stage, the teacher is going to know something is up.

  • if two other students turn in the exact same essay with their names on it, the teacher is going to feed you your own intestines.

  • if your teacher knows how to use google and turnitin.com, you will be offered no condiments with your intestines.

Fer cryin’ out loud. If you’re going to cheat, at least show a little effort.

I’ll go you one better…when you’re assigned a deconstructive essay on “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” don’t give five pages on the cosmology and cosmogeny of the collected works of John Donne. And really don’t just print out the first five pages of a fucking Oxford student’s dissertation that’s on the web. Not only do I know you never read the poem, I’m awfully damned sure that you didn’t read everything Donne wrote, including the sermons–though they might not hurt.

I was gonna post a list of things to make sure you do so that your cheating goes unnoticed. It’s really not that hard. But would that be out of line?

No, actually it probably wouldn’t hurt.

I was on SparkNotes MB for a bit. I like classic literature. I even like discussing it. I have no problem chatting about some obscure point, even if it’s for someone’s paper. I was horrified the day that someone wanted a consise rundown of what happens in Chapter 14 of Great Gatsby. Now, SparkNotes provides those. You just have to click around on the book, then go for chapter-by chapter overviews, click your chapter and bam! everything your teacher needs you to know. I pointed them to the resource but mentioned that it couldn’t hurt to read the chapter.

I got yelled at and they demanded I C&P the passage for them.

People who are willing to put in the effort aren’t going to cheat. People who aren’t are going to cheat poorly.

Scylla, I have a comment and a confession to make.

First one concerns posting a novel on here. I don’t know if you mean the entire novel, or selective passages, or what, but there are some publishers that consider doing this to be its “First Publishing” which can hurt your chances of getting it published for real. I’m not entirely up on what they consider what, but you might want to look into it beforehand.

Now, the confession. Your OP from the vegetarian thread was hilarious and I thought one of my friends, who absolutely loves eating meat, would fine it funny as well. So I sent it to him. I said I didn’t create it, but I never gave you credit. Not that he’d know who you were, but…
I also never asked your permission beforehand. For that, I apologize.

Pig-Fucking-Christ-In-Pink-Fuzzy-Slippers… :mad:

Been there, done that… I feel for you, my friend. I’ve found some of my essays online, too, up for sale. I managed to get one of them pulled, temporarily, from one site. It PISSES ME OFF.

Just like our theses, here, are archived by the National Library - and these fuckers get to sell our work, but we never see a bleepin’ penny from it. And there’s nothing we can do about it. :mad:

I’ve had my work plagiarized, too - even once at a conference, when some fucker presented MY FUCKING RESEARCH in his own name! :mad:

Mind you it was fun - I was there - I asked lots of questions, he was stuck… and I exposed him. I don’t know what he’s up to now. He was a fucking graduate from Yale, too… you’d have thunk…

GAH!

::::::: runs around being thoroughly homicidal ::::::

Elly, now calling her Happy Fun Squad boys to make her feel better.

I know precisely how the OP feels. I’ve been working on a non-fiction treastise for awhile now, and have posted sections of it online to get some preliminary feedback and make corrections. Thankfully, so far its been overwhelmingly positive.

But then I found some of my sections had magically found their way to other people’s websites, minus the credit. That really pisses me off: bad enough that they’re talentless hacks incapable of generating a thought on their own, but invariable they choose some shitty, Geocities-type ISP complete with the pop-ups, pornographic banner placements, and the 4-page, side-scrolling homage to their pet cat. Assholes.

The only bright side is that said ISPs tend to be extremely paranoid when it comes to copyright lawsuits, so all it takes is an ominously worded e-mail for them to shut down their entire site. One owner had the balls to e-mail me back this complaint:

I can’t begin to describe how reading that warmed my heart.

On another note, now I read Ender’s comments, and am worried. Did I just screw myself over from getting a publisher? Should I yank down those pages post haste?

Sue. I’m as anti- litigeous as anyone, but hit these bastards where they live, and sue them back into the stone age. Sue them for all their worth, sue their company, sue the individuals, sue the principles of the company, and sue any silent business partners they may have. Sue the company who rents them the building they inhabit.

At some point, someone decided that if you create something which has no tangible raw materials (music, literature, software, etc.)but consists solely of something you pulled out of your head, it must be free. I have a serious problem with that.

After you find and sue these people, call me. We’ll stop by and have a party. A party in which we duct-tape the offending individuals to banquet tables, cover their bodies with thousands of tiny razor blade slits, and ***drip salted boiling sesame oil onto all those tiny cuts. *** When the :wally looks like a freshly deep-fried onion, cut him loose and ask him if he’d like to sell THAT creation to someone.

b.

Don’t even THINK that I’m not deadly serious.

Ender:

You could offer a financial apology :wink:

Billy Rubin:
Mmmm. Sesame-fried plagiarist.

Is sesame oil the one with highest boiling point ?

I’m pretty sure it is. The real issue is,if you take a Presto FryBaby and get it really cooking, sesame oil will allow you to supersaturate the oil with Kosher salt. I mean you can dissolve about a half a bloody cup of Kosher salt into a quart of hot sesame oil. When you deep fry chips or fries, they end up with a lovely crust of salt, and if you get it in a deep enough cut, it’s the most painful thing I’ve experienced, and I have a gunshot wound.

The fun part is, the hurt of the boiling oil deep-frying the tattered edges of the cut intensifies the sensitivity to the pain of the salt in the cut. Quite nasty. I can only imagine what that would feel like multiplied times 1000 or so. A punishment reserved, of course, for plagiarists.

b.

P.S. Disclaimer:I would never suggest anyone EAT anything cooked this way. In my experience, you can actually FEEL your coronary arteries hardening. Yum!

These people deserve to be killed, Sofa. Don’t disappoint me.

[sub](and I am NOT exaggerating)[/sub]

You might want to get off the computer and have that looked at. Those can be serious, you know.

Thank you for all the positive feedback, folks. I’m glad to see so many people share the same outrage for having one’s hard work pilfered.

I have major support from my law office. Intellectual property, it turns out, is one small facet of my firm’s practice, because we as a firm have had problems with our work being “borrowed” by other lawyers who are trying to break into the suddenly lucrative field of Indian affairs. It’s not shooting fish in a barrel, but if I can put a couple of things together, I have a chance to come after these bastards.

Obviously, I need to recover the original document. About half of my schoolwork has been lost over time, but there is a chance I still have it. Most of my papers were bundled with my composition notes. And, get this, there is still a pretty good chance that the typewriter I composed the paper on is still in my father’s basement, in the same box as the paper itself. Perhaps being a one-time Luddite has some advantages, after all.

If I have the paper, it’s a relatively simple matter to track down the professor of that particular class. My parents are pretty good pals with a lot of the faculty at Virginia Tech, so that, too, has a better than normal chance of falling together with little expense.

If I can get both the original work and the professor’s documentation behind me, then I have a chance of nailing the bastards–if they are in the United States.

There is a pretty good chance of that, too. In fact, that’s where my stomach starts to sour a little bit. This paper was not composed in electronic format, which means that someone had to get a hard copy and transcribe it. I have the sinking suspicion that the original culprit may well be someone I know.

I know that shouldn’t change things, but somehow it does. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.