Not sure it counts as plagiarism, but I had an unusual experience with someone. She assisted her husband in some research in writing some books. He was listed as the author and she was credited as an assistant. Years later, long after her husband had died, she came out with a story that she did much of the research, etc., and suddenly people fell all over her as if she was an important historian. I think she’s full of crap.
Anyway, I happened to be a member of an internet discussion group, and she started posting questions to the group looking for answers. I provided some answers, and I was rather shocked that such an historian didn’t already know the answers. She also sent questions to me directly, and I answered them.
A while later, I looked at her website, and I noticed she put my name as the person asking the questions (the very questions she had sent to me) and then she posted the answer as if she were helping me with a question (by posting my answers to what were really her - or someone else’s - questions.) I told her I thought she was a fraud, and she needed to remove my name from her website, which she quickly did.
Back around 1990 I decided to set up a BBS. It had a variety of ANSI art screens that would randomly display when you logged in. One was a 16-color extended-ANSI version of the Don’t Panic logo from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
At the time, there were a small handful of pirate groups distributing cracked games in the region, and they would attach .nfo (text) files to each disk they released as a sort of calling card or advertisement for themselves. A few months after I created the Don’t Panic ANSI logo for my BBS, an exact black-and-white replica (using the same extended ANSI characters I did - not likely a coincidence) started appearing as one of the group’s .nfo files.
So yeah, my work got swiped by a bunch of online pirates. Rather fitting, really.
Back in the late 90s I had a website about angels: names, various rankings and hierarchies, historical information, etc. Probably not much by modern standards but the web was a smaller place then and I got a bit of traffic and ranked up near the top in web searches. One day, I noticed that some woman had lifted my site’s information wholesale – typos, formatting and all – and put it on her site. Only thing she changed was the backgrounds and images.
I wrote to her and she wrote back saying that maybe I stole her website, so there. A combination of getting bored with maintaining my site, a lack of viable courses of action and just the sheer absurdity of someone stealing a website about angels made me stop pursuing it from there and I just stopped bothering with my site.
That reminds me. Back when the abbywinters site was debuting, about six months in, there was a copycat site that didn’t steal any of our content, but did steal the format of the site. They copied and pasted my HTML, and just changed some of the Title tags. They also forgot to change the meta tags, so it had “abbywinters” in its search strings. Even their graphic logo was the same font and colours, if a different name.
We contacted them and asked them to change. In this age of the internet (back in the ancient days of the year 2001) it was such common practice to learn HTML by viewing the source code they didn’t see what the big deal was, but to their credit they worked hard to be more original after we complained. In truth I was kind of flattered, especially as it was such crude HTML I’d put together.
Does anybody remember a story, I think by Donald A. Wollheim, where there was a writer who was sick and tired of some other, much hackier, writer who kept publishing his (the narrator’s) stories. The narrator put time and effort into developing his ideas, but by the time he had polished his stories and tied his shoes, the other (hack) writer had already slung out a slapdash version of the idea? There was clearly only one solution… murder.
But just as he was perfecting his plan, there was a knock on the door…
I swear to all that’s Hugo-worthy, I have notes for stories that would have made for shitty versions of The Matrix, Moon, The Martian, and at least a dozen other tales that have been turned into (much better) movies and novels than I would have written if I were able to ever to believe in myself as a writer.
It’s crazy, and I’m sure there’s some sort of more rational explanation involving zeitgeist and societal whatnot, but I can’t quite bring myself to disbelieve that many of your favorite movies and stories come from someone leaching ideas from my brain and polishing them into something far better than I could create on my own.
Decades ago, when I lived in NYC, I commented that one of my coworkers was “wading in the shallow end of the gene pool.” Another coworker frequented a bar where many writers had hung out, and had quoted me there. Before long, it was a common phrase.
Around the same time, at work, I was developing a system whereby computers could calculate all the kerning for any particular font, using seven “zones” for each character. I had been working on this system for several years, before being told that one of our competitors had found out about it, and was using it themselves. Unfortunately they simplified the process, with crappy results.
I was heavily involved in a low budget sci-fi film. For a couple days we shot a large crowds of costumed extras. I was using the phrase “Techno Peasants” to describe them to a newscaster who covered the “event”.
Sure enough, on the 5:00 news, “Crowds of techno peasants” was a news story. Ha!
In middle school in the early 80s I drew comics involving anthropomorphic fast food characters who argued with each other, engaged in stupid hijinks and sometimes acted out parodies of movies and TV shows. No grumpy neighbor, though.
Which reminds me of the senior Maxim engineer I spoke with in the mid 80’s. Many or the circuits he’d published in Maxim application notes had been re-published by other people. Which would have bothered him, except that he’d copied them from other people in turn…
On a message board (maybe even this one) people were discussing time travel movies. I tossed out my idea of an alternate ending for the film “Timecop”. The very same twist was used in the series finale of “Continuum”.
