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.