I own a site called Dragon’s Mark, which is run with the help of four friends. It’s a site, well a group of sites set up for free form role-playing. Basically, a form of creative writing, usually done on a collaborative scale. The forums are generally used to posting of story items written by our site members. These can range from short “play by post” set-ups where two or more players write out a scene together, to much more elaborate stories that make up scenes from the life of the various characters.
Recently we had an issue crop up where it was found that a number of story type postings were plagiarized. The original poster has said it was not intentional, that the stories were purchased from a ghost-writer. That’s really neither here nor there. The fact is, the items were plagiarized, taken from various fan-fiction sources. the OP took most of them down, well, took down pretty much everything they had ever posted. We (the admins of the site) took down some others. The whole thing has left a bit of an open sore sort of feeling with a number of folks.
I do not, by any means, claim to be an expert on this issue, but I have learned a number of things about plagiarism and fan-fiction over the last couple of weeks.
Ok, there are lots of reasons. But what about the ones like this site, where it’s just my personal crud. When it comes to ranting, yea, it can be cathartic to write stuff, get it out there. We all would like to have that place where we can just let ‘er rip. But the stuff that really eats at you, the things you reaaaaaaaly want to say - you can’t. Can you?
