Tapping Away in the Middle of the Night

Update: I got an email back from Authspot within minutes of putting this post up. It simply said, 'Post Removed'. I couldn't include the update at the time because we were starting to get hammered by a thunderstorm and - having lost modems in the past during thunderstorms - had to quickly rush this out so I could unplug the thing.

(Well, I didn't 'have' to ... I wanted to).



Sorry: Given this was the first time I'd ever been the victim of someone stealing my work, I had no idea how I'd react. I dashed this post off pretty quickly and was really rather grumpy as I did so. As such, I wrote some things I wouldn't normally write (I'm irrational when I'm angry, and say all sorts of weird shit, so it stands to reason I'd write irrationally when angry, too):

Originally posted by clean:

I wonder what other little cocksuckers out there have stolen my content and tried to pass it off as their own?

Apologies to any of my readers who might be offended at the use of the term 'cocksuckers'. It wasn't meant as a slur at gay people (or people who like the cock in general, I suppose ). Anyone who knows me knows I don't discriminate against race, sexual identity, etc. I discriminate against people being assholes, sure, but not the fundamentals. It was just the word I happened to use at the time.

Originally posted by clean:

If I'm ever feeling potentially vengeful, I'll figure out how to dox you and let your teachers/university/boss know about your proclivity for theft.

'Dox' is a term meaning 'to find information on someone' (find documents ('dox') about them), and is often something done by hacker collectives like Anonymous. Having nothing to do with the group, I literally have no idea how I'd go about 'doxing' someone. Nor do I want to know. Nor would I try. The post is down. As far as I'm concerned, that's the end of the matter.

But I did get angry and irrational for a few minutes there ...



That said, I actually feel a little guilty (just a little ... break out your electron microscopes to see the particle). He might've been young when he posted it, he might've done it without thinking. I'm not losing any money over it (I'm not making any money from it). One or two people who know him may see the post has been removed and find out why and he'll lose a friend, or something. And - on the whole - my little rant above comes off seeming rather childish.

Oh, well. Stiff shit.



Full marks to the people running Authspot for the quick takedown!

Well, that goes without saying.

Funny thing is, I clicked on a couple of links of his to see if he'd stolen any more of my work ... and without even trying found links to his full name, his Facebook, his Twitter, his YouTube account (reasonably decent guitar player, actually, from the 10 seconds of auto-play video I watched), the fact he's in a band that plays ... er ... cover songs ... of other people's work ...

Like I said, I'm not interested in taking things further, but it wouldn't be difficult ...

Does she have it backed up somewhere? If not, maybe someone else stole it and put it online under their own name ...

I suspect most people would.

It was curious ... I had no idea how I'd react to such a thing since it'd never happened before. Oh, well ...

As shown in Mik's post, there are ways to find out if your content is being used elsewhere without your permission. This post on WordPress is extremely comprehensive and offers many methods as well as giving you options for action to take if you find your work has been stolen.

Of course, I didn't follow any of it, since I hadn't read it beforehand. I just Googled the first sentence of my story (in inverted commas to indicate to Google to search for exactly those words).

Here's another good article ...