So today I got the progress meter working (*waves to progress charts link above post*) and I spent some time reading about the plagerism of blog articles.  In particular, the hell hath no fury like the internet out for blood response to Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs, who stole, edited, and reprinted without permission the words of blogger Monica Gaudio. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Smart Bitches website sums it up pretty well.
This really strikes a note for me. I first got turned onto the issue by my friend from Forward Motion, Suelder because she knew I had faced a similar issue some months back. A website named Mahalo.com ripped a piece from my Muse Medicine blog about rib injuries – information intended to help writers of fiction get things right from a medical perspective – and posted it as treatment and diagnostic advice for their readers.
This isn’t the first time that something like this happened. My Muse Medicine articles on breastfeeding and the plague have been swiped before as well. I found out because having been alerted to one plagerism, I started to Google strings of text from pages that get a lot of traffic on my site once or twice a year. It is not vanity, but self-preservation that prompts me to do this. Both my blog and my Muse Medicine site offer clear, concise copyright notices, and further, my Muse Medicine site specifically states that information on the site is not to be used as treatment or diagnosis advice. This is important, as I’m not a physician and am not qualified or licensed to provide treatment advice to real people.
Despite what “editors” like Judith Griggs and sites like Mahalo.com think, the internet is not a wordage free-for-all, where anyone can steal the words of others and make a profit from them. My cease and desist letters have never been responded to in such spectacular fashion, but they have proven to be effective (so far). In Ms. Gaudio’s case, the internet struck back in her defense.
(I would just like to point out that Neil Gaiman didn’t retweet my experience with asshats who steal words from the internet *pout* 😉 )
On a related note, I did do my google-string search today and discovered that while my words are safe this time, my internet handle is apparently not. There were birth announcements for a couple of girls named “Arizela” up on the net this period. Prior to this period, the only thing google said I shared the name with was a particularly unattractive genus of moths. Wonder if the parents realize just what they’re naming their daughters after?
