#WritersCoffeeClub August 29: Talk about an experience you've had with plagiarism.
The most pernicious in recent memory: a couple of weeks after "A Conventional Boy" came out this past January, some bastard began selling it in online bookstores at half price, using a lookalike unicode glyph in the author name so it looked like me but was linked to their own bank account—with a big 50% OFF SALE medallion on the cover image.
My trad publishers have anti-piracy departments to deal with that shit.
OK then.... My experience with plagiarism:
[Update March 2015:
From August 2013 when I first posted this:
https://sciencepolice2010.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/the-history-girls-1-the-romans-and-the-roses
to the appearance of a piece by The Daily Mail,
...featuring mini-interviews with another set of History Girls, but still using that phrase in the title, took 3 months 🙂 . Tho' it's not bad, by the standards of the Mail. …f you forget that they’ve taken the trouble to give their ages, and only selected those in their 30’s! ]
Bastards. Artist friends have the same issues, but not a huge bank of lawyers to back them up, it's like playing whack a mole, slap one down, and two more pop up. One thief even had the gall to steal artwork with the watermark on it! And the t shirt companies didn't even blink. They don't check, even though it would only take a few seconds to see if the artwork was original. Only time they back down was when a large US college sued.
A.I. Is simply another high tech version of the same theft techniques. Claiming other's works as your own and not paying the writer or artist. Like music "sampling" (theft) Major record labels are cool with it because it costs them next to nothing to create an album, and that's all they care about, money, not originality.
Bands have all but disappeared from the pop scene for the same reason. You only need one singer, and a couple of tech guys with computer music noise generators. All formulaic crap, with a handful of exceptions and Indie labels.
Feels like it would be such a brief tenuous way to get money!
@semanticist Yeah, they rely on flying under the radar. In this case, they failed because they stuck the pirate copy on sale too soon after launch date and one of my fans emailed me about it. But if they'd waited another week, until the gotta-have-it-now crowd had all bought it …
Also, it was an ebook. You can just about automate that piracy workflow: buy, crack DRM, edit the cover, upload dodgy version under your seller account, repeat for every new title that month.
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