Plagiarism Is Illegal

Just in case anyone’s wondering.

Check out this post and the comment trail on Liz Fielding’s blog. Liz was recently plagiarized and so were several other romance authors mentioned in the comment trail. Kudos to everyone who helped uncover the thief.

It doesn’t matter if you downloaded a story for free when it was offered as such from Amazon or a publisher or the author herself. That doesn’t give you the right to RE-publish the story yourself! That doesn’t give you the right to change character names and titles and upload the story for your own financial gain. It doesn’t give you the right to upload the story under your name and then give it away for free, either.

You know what right it does gives you? The right to read the story. To save it for your re-reading pleasure.

Plagiarism is illegal. And authors will not stand for it. You can only hide for so long. The Internet will help expose you.

In case you didn’t know.

Published
Categorized as Writing

By Cindy

I'm irritated because my posts won't publish.

3 comments

  1. That’s the problem, isn’t it, Robin? The publishers rely on authors not selling them plagiarized material. What publisher would knowingly publish stolen copyrighted material? Unless, I guess, they figured they might get some publicity when the matter is exposed. But no, I don’t see that happening. It’s very BAD publicity, after all.

    It’s embarrassing for the publisher when it happens. But it’s horrible for the writer who gets plagiarized. I’m sure most everyone in the romance industry remembers the Nora Roberts/Janet Daily debacle (Janet done Nora wrong, not the other way around).

    Thanks for dropping by, Robin.

  2. I just checked out your link and noted that Ming Books is a bookseller. I’m glad a bookseller is against selling stolen material, but how would they really know? Do you take down books if you find out the copyright has been stolen? I wish I remembered the titles of the Janet Dailey books that had paragraphs lifted from Nora Roberts’ books, but it happened several years ago. Re-selling those titles WOULD be selling plagiarised material.

    NOT saying Ming Books does this.

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