Can someone steal a novel?

Say what? Really? How did you find out?

And I wonder how he thought he could get away with it.

 

You can also google several paragraphs at once. I think they limited it to 500 words. I have done that with some post to see if it's legit.

 

I wonder if they also did it to see how someone else's work would be perceived once seen as an unknown author's work instead of someone who is already established. Maybe as an experiment or something to study why people like the things that they do. I really can't see why someone would feel a boost after something like that, it's like inserting a cheat code to get a good score instantly, so it makes little sense to me anyway.

 

I've seen people try to pass off such work as their own as well and I don't believe it likely that it's just an 'experiment.' At the very least, someone who wanted to run that kind of experiment on a forum should alert the mods and ask for permission first (which will likely be denied because the user would be deceiving the members of the site who are going to put their time into a critique).

 

People do all kinds of stupid stuff. In my critique group, one author took the unpublished work of another author and released it as far and wide as he could, just because they hated each other. Not only did he get ousted from the group but the lawyers had a field day.

 

Of course... I only said so because people run social experiments for YouTube videos all the time, so I wouldn't put this past someone.

 

Sure, but I imagine the mods don't do that routinely as a matter of course, which is why I was curious.

 

I guess they thought they'd picked something sufficiently obscure. Maybe it started with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

 

"It was a dark and stormy night..."

 

Same reason people play online with godmode on. It's not the game that matters, it's about being able to say you did it.
I have several solutions for people like that, as well as the plagiarists, but it's a work in progress. I don't know how to dispose of their remains yet.

 

Well then... that's ominous...