So as a few of you know I'm relatively new here. Like GREEEN HORN new. lol I'm not sure where to post this so I chose the best place possible. It's for research of course. So I can make a decision down the road. Some background before I post my questions. I posted in another thread a week or so ago here: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/based-on-my-list-where-do-i-fit-genre-wise.153382/#post-1583259 and even though it was a separate topic and all which is unrelated, I brought up how I felt about sharing my work due to past issues with friends and such. Quoting jannert: "Obviously, you are nervous about showing your work around (you'll probably need to get over this at some point) but if you can give us a short, focused summary of how your story/stories is/are set up and what 'happens' to them, then we can maybe help." This ended up prompting a question last night that I had about protecting my work. People I notice often post excerpts and such on here and or ask people to so they can better analyze their works and help them, which is great. I'm just not sure I'm ready for that yet with old wounds and such. So my question was on plagiarism, I know what it is and how it's done. That's why I'm very protective of my work. I read this article https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/plagiarism-in-the-age-of-self-publishing/485525/ which I suggest many an aspiring author read before they choose self-publishing. (This is the route I'd ultimately like to go as well.) It talks about the rampant problem over at Amazon with various offenders. Another article I read which I can't find for the life of me. I'll describe a part of it. Two people were signing onto a publisher and one of them stole a book from the other and the offendie didn't find out about it until after they both made it to the stands. Later in the article, the author said he confronted the other with his same publisher and he gave a statement essentially saying you shouldn't have shared your work with me. Like it gave him a free pass to snag it. Then it ended up solidifying my fears of sharing my work. (I don't want to do that to you but make you aware of the problem.) Seems to mostly happen to romance genre but it can happen to anyone. I read other articles and I'll post them here for anyone who wants to read them. On the problem as well as taking precautions. https://www.fastcompany.com/1807211/amazons-plagiarism-problem https://www.diggypod.com/blog/plagiarism-self-publishing/ http://www.writehacked.com/self-publishing/self-published-authors-what-you-should-know-about-copyright-and-plagiarism/ http://www.steubenpress.com/blog/posts/51-how-to-reduce-the-epidemics-of-plagiarism-in-the-era-of-self-publishing So my questions are is it really worth the risk sharing a work of fiction especially something that is nearing completion? And what if this work happened to be the next best seller? How do you guys feel about this? Am I being overly sensitive? I have a complicated story and universe I don't want to jeopardize a 20-year long project.... But it will need to go through the editing process at some time. Last questions referring to last statement: Some of you I have read online pay people online to edit your work and ready it for amazon. What's stopping them from stealing your work as well? What are the risks there we're not seeing?
The same reason why your mechanic doesn't steal your car or your groomer doesn't steal your dog: they'd be out of business in a heartbeat if they did. This assumes, of course, that you're working with a reputable editor and not some random hack on the internet. As for our workshop forum, what could anybody possibly do with a first chapter? They could try to write the rest of it, sure, but it wouldn't look anything like what the rest of your book looks like. Odds of that are pretty damn low. Plagiarism is part of the business. You'll never be 100% safe, but you're also not likely to turn a dime without the help of critiques and beta readers either. I understand your concerns but there's isn't anything you can do about them.
People steal my work all the time. Usually just pirates, but once someone took a full book, changed the character names and the title, and republished it under his/her name. If you're publishing work in this day and age, it's going to get stolen. It sucks, but it's reality. So worrying about someone stealing your unpublished, still needs to be edited and polished and fixed, work? Why would they, when it's so easy to steal the published stuff?
However, people do all the time on Deviantart.com unpublished fanfiction posted to other sites. It's technically published but not through DA because it's limited from my understanding. Becuase it lacks a copyright registration.
I think what @BayView means is that the problem really erupts when it's a finished product (I think that's easier than getting into the minutia of what counts as published). A slice of a work in progress posted to a community like this is of little value to anyone because sites such as ours are workshopping sights. The pieces are typically only partial and quite nascent.
What? What's limited? And what does copyright registration have to do with it? ETA: Also, did you change the text of the stuff you quoted from me? There's a "you're" that should be "your" in the text you quoted, and when I checked the original it's "your" up there...?
I have Grammarly installed to catch mistakes. Lol sorry, I pasted and wrote then went through and fixed stuff regardless of where I was at on the topic. I wrote the whole thing over the course of an hour while watching my son. So I wrote what I needed to say and corrected it after I came back from feeding him. So sorry if it got caught in there. I was just being fast in my corrections. I had tons of red from typing fast. When I type fast I tend to get really sloppy, and when posting I tend to want things to be as professional as possible. The whats limited is the copyrights that Deviantart gives out on the creative commons license. Also, copyright registration has a lot to do with writing anyway. I've done a lot of research on writing. They made a new law here a while back stating that when you write/type something it's automatically copyrighted to you, but in order to have the full legal benefits of that copyright, it needs to be registered. That way if someone does plagiarize you can sue if need be.
To be brutally honest, once it is on the web regardless of where or how it got there, it is mostly public domain. If someone likes your work expect quotation marks around it; uncaring users will steal it, some may provide proper attribution, others may not. Any artwork or original content is up for grabs, songs, sketches, photos, a blog post, and stories. If you have the money or someone with money to protect it, then you might be able to chase after those who do this. If you think about it: entire blockbuster movies are stolen and put on the web for free, and after spending millions, the movie companies are still at a loss on how to stop it. Something like Deviant Art is massive, the amount of traffic it gets is ridiculous, and you sit between obscurity and your work getting stolen. On a site like this one, you get some traffic, but there is also a matter of trust among its members. The odds are much lower, here than on some site where you would be actively trying to promote your art work. This site is not a promotion website and more of a brainstorming and collaborative self-service help center for writers. Functionally very different in how things are presented and to your concern propagate from the comparative environments. There are also some very famous writers who will be quite open about their early years, and even later years: steal, cheat, steal -- your ideas are coming from somewhere, a campfire story, an event in your life, something a friend said to you, the movie you watched last week. Mimicry is at times the greatest form of flattery. How many romance stories mimic Romeo and Juliet or another great piece of literature. How many plot lines do sitcoms have? There is a reason people say -- the story has too many clichés -- the ideas have been copied so many times it becomes apparent to a casual observer, they already know how it is going to end. It's what you do with those ideas and how you blend them that makes them uniquely yours. As for out right plagiarism though they will get caught, and best of luck to them when word gets around. Especially if it is originating from a smaller community like this one.
Very well said. I'll take that all into consideration. All though I don't totally agree with that 1st part so much because even if something makes it onto the internet that doesn't necessarily make it public domain because it's still intellectual property. It's harder to prove who stole it especially if you have no money to help the process along. But it can be done. Pursuing intellectual property stuff is very hard because you have to be able to prove it in a court of law.
You understand that it wasn't a correction, right? It was correct in the original, and you changed it to being wrong? It's not a big deal, but I just wanted to be sure you understood that Grammarly and its friends have their limitations. DeviantArt can't "give out" copyrights. The copyright is yours - as you say, it happens as soon as you create the work. There are quite a few threads on this board about copyright - if you can find them, they might help clarify some points for you.
Yeah, you're right I was trying to miss the quote. I was trying to avoid changing it. I'd edit the original post but I don't see an edit button or I'd repaste it. Sorry about my lack of attention there. Please accept my apology. Thank you for your help in the threads too by the way, and I'll be sure to be more careful with Grammarly. When I type my story out I leave it looking pretty terrible and do my corrections later, I usually write fast so I don't lose my thoughts. I use ms office so I don't know how perfect it is either. That's why when I hit the editing stage I need someone I can trust. My ideas are good I know but I'm lacking the skills in writing I used to since like every talent out there if you don't use it you lose it. Thanks for the tip on the copyright stuff as well.
Only in the sense that if the security guard isn't looking, everything in the store is "free". Public domain has a specific meaning, and that isn't it.
I used public domain as an expression to show anyone can take it, as to the legality of it this is an entirely different issue. Which was also pointed out as; if you have the money to chase after it. It's a mindset I use anytime I post something, I have no expectation of it being respected as copyrighted or seen as intellectual property. I gave the best of that away anyways for a few measly dollars a year, my employer made millions from the software, he purchased for a handful of salaries. In most cases, if someone takes a piece from me I just let it go, I'm rarely attached to something to the point of wanting to hide it from the world. There are a number of ways of looking at it too: 1. thank you, I appreciate that you like my work to the extent you wanted to promote it. 2. I suppose you needed the money and glad I could help you out... just drop me a thank you note next time. --- Ask me I would have probably just given you permission to use it anyway. Can you put your name on it --- well if you can give me a good enough reason then maybe why not. 3. I am sorry you lack the creative ability to come up with something of your own or have the inability to adapt and morph a piece you like into something different and unique. As an example, I could have downloaded and watched Atomic Blonde two full days before it was released in theatres. It was available to me and millions of other people on the web. It was a personal ethics and moral decision on my part to pay and see it on opening night.
true... I'll use single quotes next time I use a term conceptually and outside of its specific meaning
I've used Grammarly for some time and never in my life have I seen it incorrectly mark my use of your and you're. That's one of those errors that sticks out to me like a tomato in a basket of blueberries. I would have noticed if it did that.
But you can't think that way that's how people get crushed by companies and ceo's become the money grubbing winners. If you take that tact on everything you'll never get anywhere in life. On top of that, you're comparing apples and oranges. Both which are incredibly illegal. You sound incredibly confused on how things really work? Please don't take that as an attack. Let's say you made a best seller. Would you want to make the money off that or have people pirate your book and barely make enough to live?
Honestly, I feel like there is a lot of mental and emotional energy expended by folks thinking that their ideas and snippets are worthy of larceny. To turn something like that into a separate work is almost as much work as just coming up with something on one's own. The final execution is what tempts plagiarizers, because most of the time they're looking for a quick buck, not something to build their own piece on.
For it to be a best seller it would first have to sell, people give their books and labors of love away for free just to get some kind of light to be shown in their little corner of the world. Just because you wrote the next Tolkien doesn't mean it will be recognized as such. It might be years before someone who can sink $$$ into promoting it properly sees it and is willing to drop serious dollars into it as a project. 1000 great 5 star reviews and on the bookbub.com list for free, I see this all the time, and from a financial standpoint, they are not making a living. Ditto for some published authors. Out of the hyper-hurricane that is the art world, I'm not expecting much. if a handful of people like what I write then cool, I'm good. Creative story telling is definitely not my primary source of income, and I never had an expectation it would be.
I'm wondering if it might quiet the OP's fears about this site (and she's new to us), if anybody here can remember any instance where anybody's work was stolen from our workshops and plagiarized? Has that ever happened here on our Writers' Forum? Actually, I'm curious myself. The concept of online piracy is relatively new for all art forms, and is complicated by the international nature of the internet. I think it's one of the 'new' things we need to think about and take on board. Nobody is sure how to deal with it, really. And as far as I know (which isn't very far!) you can't copyright your ideas anyway, only your actual words. I would say if you have ample proof that the work is indeed yours—old, dated files of various drafts and notes, and perhaps copies of chapters mailed to your own email address, etc— that's probably the best you can do to protect yourself before publication. After publication? I'll step aside and let the members here who ARE published fill in the gaps. But honestly. You'll need to let your work go 'out there' at some stage, or you might as well be writing for yourself. And as others have pointed out, it's after publication that the real worries begin. Meanwhile, @Xboxlover , I suspect you'll be needing and wanting feedback for your work. Only one way to get it. Take the plunge! Just don't put the whole work online. Only give us snippets, and I reckon you'll be safe enough. Eventually you may come to trust individual members enough to trade work for beta reading.
I feel like these posts should be combined into a sticky thread, since this question comes up a lot. Not that the other posts in this thread were wrong, just that these three get to the nub of it.
@Xboxlover , first I had your concern over having my work stolen, and still to this day, will not put it up on line. If I share my work, I share by e-mail (I had about thirty betas, some on this site), and keep a file of to whom I sent it. I ask for their real name and address, not just the e-mail. As to copyright, that is not a new law, it has always been that way. For my big work, I went the copyright registration route as soon as it was complete, $35 via copyright.gov... but that only increases your chance of getting damages in the event of infringement, making it easier to sue. Your work is copyrighted as soon as you write it. What I have learned since publishing, is that anyone wanting to steal someone else's work for money will make more stealing boxes of matches. We all dream of the big best-seller, and E&D is doing quite well for a self-pubbie, but it may be next century before I earn enough money for that Maserati, if they still make them then. Relax, just use good judgment as to how and where you share your work.
I would strongly recommend against that. Obviously it worked for Lew but if I'd offered to give up several hours of my life (for me, a beta of a standard-length novel takes about 10 hours) and someone demanded personal data on the assumption that I might steal from them... I'd tell them to jog on. Not because I have any intention of stealing, but because that's downright insulting.
Yeah, there's no way on earth I'd share my real name and address with someone for the "privilege" of doing them a huge favour. If that person doesn't trust me, why would I trust that person?
I have never had a problem. I would never make that request on an open forum like this, where I think it would in fact be insulting. I make the first act of trust by giving them my e-mail, and ask them to respond. Within the e-mail, I ask if they would mind sharing their name and address. Mine is at the bottom of all my e-mails. I am of an age where anonymity (as opposed to privacy) is not something valued, and people of my age like to know with whom they are working. I have never had anyone turn me down, or get insulted, and I in turn, am not sure I would want to work with someone who responded like that. And a number of my betas got mentioned in the acknowledgments, for the great help they gave. Many became good friends, and I and my wife are flying to the UK to visit two in a few weeks. Not wanting to get an off-topic argument going here!
