don't steal my words, use them as a source of inspiration

Hello again all of you beautiful people! I am back! Thanks to being on holiday in the UK and USA for the past six weeks, I haven't had any time to write. Now that I'm finally home (and I've gotten over the jetlag), I'll be able to update this blog more regularly. I've got tons of posts planned, including some that  veer away from socially relevant issues and hit lighter topics such as my holiday and the new doctor (Peter Capaldi, you guys!). Today however, I will be discussing an issue that is considered very important in today's day and age of easy internet sharing. Plagiarism.

The newly renovated Statue of Liberty, which I got to see on my trip to New York City. Source: my camera

We all know the concept of plagiarism, but none of us ever think that it might happen to us. We write, draw, take photographs etc. and put them up on the internet so that we can share them with people from all over the world. Why? Because it's awesome to get feedback from people you don't know.  I know that I never, ever thought that someone would have the nerve to steal something that I created and re-post it, claiming that it was theirs. But it happened.

Back in February, I wrote a novella for my MYP Personal Project. It was a young-adult book about cyber bullying and identity theft, and I wanted it to be easily available for teenagers to access to spread awareness about the potential dangers of the internet. After all, every great thing has risks, right? So I posted it on Fictionpress (click the link to go to the story), which is a pretty great site where you can post your writing online and get feedback from the people in the community who read it. In July, I received word from some of the lovely people who had read my story that it had been plagiarised by a person called Jessica Beckwith and posted onto Amazon for sale! She had also stolen the work of several other FictionPress authors, claiming that she had written the stories. Ironically, the name of my story is 'Stolen'. I'm beginning to think I probably should have named it something else.

What happened to me is only a single incident of plagiarism. After all, it's very easy to simply copy and paste things off the internet and save it to your own computer. There are several other thieves out there who go around copying work and claiming that it is their own. This is incredibly, incredibly wrong, as they are taking all the credit for another person's hard work- work that they contributed nothing towards. And yet it happens all the time.

source: let-me-ftw.tumblr.com

So how do we protect ourselves from plagiarism on the internet? Well, it certainly is hard. I think that you've just got to make sure that you can prove that the work is yours. For example, my novella was published four months before it was put up on Amazon by someone else. Copyrighting your work doesn't hurt either, as you will then get a legal leg to stand on. After all, you can never be too careful.

I tried to look for a quote to leave you with, but I couldn't find an appropriate one. So I shall end this post by restating the title. "Don't steal my words. Use them as a source of inspiration."