Sunday, January 22, 2006
Byebye public poetry boards
A recent plagiarism issue at the Alsop Review Gazebo coupled with my growing dissatisfaction with the response I get on public critique forums means I'll no longer be posting my work on the public boards I've been part of (really only the Gazebo and Eratosphere anytime recently). I'll still show up on those boards some, and I'll still post my drafts here and at Steve M.'s private forum, which you should really check out if you're looking for a good online workshop. E-mail him about it if you aren't already in it.
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It sounds incredibly arrogant on my part, but I always worry that someone will steal my poem and submit it to a magazine and I'll be left wondering why on earth I didn't submit it.
Did something like this happen at the Gazebo?
Did something like this happen at the Gazebo?
I'm interested, too, in what happened at Gazebo. I used to participate fairly activitly back in like 1993 and 1994---it was one of the first poetry forums, I think.
Praytell....
Praytell....
Yeah, someone took poems that were workshopped there and posted them online as their own work. There are threads about it at the Gazebo and Eratosphere.
I had this happen to me. And the asshole even changed the punctuation to include drippy teen angst elipses at the end of every strophe. I wanted to puke.
# posted by 
: January 25, 2006 11:48 AM
: January 25, 2006 11:48 AM
This act of plagiarism wasn’t so serious because the poems were posted to a personal website. It would have been far more complicated if the plagiarist had published them in a reputable e-zine for example.
Ironically, the fact that these poems had been originally posted to poetry workshops and blogs made it easier to prove authorship, as the poems had been archived and dated. Because there were several stolen poems, the dated evidence was overwhelming. That doesn’t apply to Erato where poems are deleted from the archive after 30 days, which seems like a good idea until you need to prove a stolen poem is yours.
This plagiarist had stolen one of my poems (not even one of my best. I mean, that plagiarist had no taste!). I cited my dated evidence, along with poems of three other poets who’d had work stolen, to the plagiarist’s site administrator. Faced with that evidence, the administrator took the entire site down.
Even publishing poems in an e-zine still leaves poems vulnerable to plagiarism. I wonder how many e-zine poems find their way into print journals under the authorship of a plagiarist? Or into other e-zines?
I find the Internet to be a great place to display and read poetry and wouldn’t want to stop showing my poems there because of the plagiarism threat. How to prove authorship? I’ve heard of people storing and dating their poems in secure, un-indexable sites online. I don’t know how to do that, but it’s an option I might look into.
On the other hand, an expensive international court case to prove authorship would, in most cases, mean paying out more in court fees than I’d ever recover. So I’m left in two minds on whether to continue to send my poems to Internet sites or not.
Ironically, the fact that these poems had been originally posted to poetry workshops and blogs made it easier to prove authorship, as the poems had been archived and dated. Because there were several stolen poems, the dated evidence was overwhelming. That doesn’t apply to Erato where poems are deleted from the archive after 30 days, which seems like a good idea until you need to prove a stolen poem is yours.
This plagiarist had stolen one of my poems (not even one of my best. I mean, that plagiarist had no taste!). I cited my dated evidence, along with poems of three other poets who’d had work stolen, to the plagiarist’s site administrator. Faced with that evidence, the administrator took the entire site down.
Even publishing poems in an e-zine still leaves poems vulnerable to plagiarism. I wonder how many e-zine poems find their way into print journals under the authorship of a plagiarist? Or into other e-zines?
I find the Internet to be a great place to display and read poetry and wouldn’t want to stop showing my poems there because of the plagiarism threat. How to prove authorship? I’ve heard of people storing and dating their poems in secure, un-indexable sites online. I don’t know how to do that, but it’s an option I might look into.
On the other hand, an expensive international court case to prove authorship would, in most cases, mean paying out more in court fees than I’d ever recover. So I’m left in two minds on whether to continue to send my poems to Internet sites or not.
Revisiting this thread, as it's important. One solution, I think, is to ensure permanent online archives. Then it is easy to track down what poem was published when, at least from an e-zine perspective. All in all, I think it will be more difficult to plagiarize (sp.?) poems appearing online than those not appearing online, simply because it will be easier to prove the original source.
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