[ SECRET POST #2958 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2958 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 054 secrets from Secret Submission Post #423.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[dreemyweird]

Unless you're absolutely freaking amazing at writing (which I'm not saying you're not, of course), chances are your works aren't going to be plagiarised. I have been in a lot of fandoms for old literary canon sources, and in my experience they are:

1) small. There's simply not enough of a fanbase to inspire interest sufficient for someone to plagiarise fanfiction.

2) obscure. Unscrupulous people who make money by publishing dubious stuff don't lurk there. They're too busy writing god awful porn.

I can maybe see students turning your work in as homework, but honestly?? Why would the fact that some random lazy twenty-something person used your fanfic to get one "A" for their course disturb you so much that you wouldn't want to write any fanfic at all? This seems terribly disproportional.

Additionally, newbies (and, let's be honest, many of the more experienced writers, too) tend do drastically overestimate their plot bunnies' potential and their writing.

[sarillia]

I kind of agree with your last line, but I think people really overvalue ideas in general and don't think as much about the execution as they should.

[(Anonymous)]

this, very much.

[(Anonymous)]

You're assuming plagiarist only copy amazing works which is sadly not true.
And those people know their niches better than most, so if they think they can make some money (or get some praise) of it? They would do it, so I get OP's fears.

[dreemyweird]

Oh, no, I didn't mean that. I just think that fanfic from big and flourishing fandoms (e.g. Sherlock) is far more likely to get plagiarised, regardless of its quality. On the other hand, to get someone to steal your work done for a small and obscure fandom, you need to be really damn good.

However, I must also note that I don't think plagiarism of this sort is terribly common at all. Granted, I have no statistics to support this view, so it's just anecdata, but I've never seen any plagiarism wank in any of my fandoms.

[(Anonymous)]

Fanfics from big and flourishing fandoms would also be far more likely to get noticed if someone plagiarised it. You'd be surprised where some prolific fanfic readers end up, and the things they can call out.

If you were going to do it, then something obscure would be a much safer bet as far as not drawing attention to yourself goes.

[dreemyweird]

That's a fair point, but small fandoms based on old books update so rarely and have so little content diversity that it's actually pretty difficult to find something that suits your purpose. Plus, they have little "generic" fic where you could just strip all the names off and pretend it's original fiction.

I really don't think that this does, in fact, happen with any sort of regularity. Maybe I am wrong, but my general impression is that it's easier to write something of your own (where you could change the wordcount, the topics, etc.) than to roam fannish spaces in search of material. Granted, one may not be a good writer, but as you've rightly pointed out, all sorts of rubbish gets plagiariased and published, so I don't see how that'd be an obstacle.

[(Anonymous)]

"Additionally, newbies (and, let's be honest, many of the more experienced writers, too) tend do drastically overestimate their plot bunnies' potential and their writing."

Yeah, sorry, got to agree with this. I try not to roll my eyes every time someone wails about omg, what if someone steals my ideeeeeas? Er... yeah, your ideas are probably not original in the first place and even if it did happen, it's just an idea. Nobody has sole dibs on an idea.

[(Anonymous)]

This^

I can't tell you the number of people who have come to me with a good idea that if I write it, then we can split the money. Doesn't work that way. Ideas are the easy part. Writing much more so.

Also I have been seeing more and more "I call dibs" on a trope that has been done before.

Then there is the " you stole my title " but that's another day

[(Anonymous)]

(OP)
I don't consider myself an amazing writer by any means. And I know for a fact that I'm a lousy artist! (I gave up even trying a while back.) Nonetheless, in the years I've been active in fandom, I've had both writing (once - that I know of) and "art" (multiple times) stolen before.

(...And I can't even count the number of anecdotes I've heard from other, student-aged writers in some of my fandoms, along the lines of: "yeah, so I found out my friend 'borrowed' this story of mine and [went through it changing all the character names to make it unidentifiable, then] submitted it for their own class". It seems to be so much a hazard of all sorts of writing, that posting fanfics for the things actually taught in Literature courses seems like practically inviting it to happen.)

So it's not because I think my ideas or writing are amazing that I imagine them being stolen; I imagine them being stolen because I know some people's standards are not high and they're just as happy to steal mediocre crap. In fact past experience has made me pretty sure some people deliberately target the mediocre crap - all the better to con [whomever] into thinking that they did it themselves: "Hey, if I were going to steal, I'd steal something awesome, right? Not this rubbish! Therefore this is obviously all my own work!"

Maybe some other people wouldn't care (and judging from the tone of the aforementioned anecdotes, many don't), but the idea of theft bothers me greatly. I don't want to be able to shrug it off as insignificant (even if there is something disproportional about my feelings on the matter). The mitigating factor of writing for most other (copyright-protected) fandoms is that nobody can really 'profit' from stealing that stuff, whether financially or in any other way. The best they'll be getting out of stealing someone else's unauthorised fan works is undeserved praise.

(...And sure, literary fandoms may not be the peak of popularity, but not all of them are hopelessly obscure either.)

[(Anonymous)]

you sound really really paranoid for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

If someone for whatever reason steals your work and turns it in as homework, how the hell would you even know?

If someone for whatever reason steals your work and puts it up on Amazon, then file a complaint with Amazon and show them your work, posted to the site of your choice days/weeks/months/years before.

You seem to have a lot of faith in the quality of these unwritten fics of yours.

[hiyami]

Not OP.

I had 2 people submitting to me plagiarised poems as "tributes" to an actor I had a fanpage about, specifically asking for me to credit them for it. The most plagiarized and the most touchy about having their name credited, it seems. And there was nothing to gain from it.

That's when I realized that plagiarist have very low standards of claims for fame. I don't think they give a damn about quality.

[dreemyweird]

Oh, I see. That's odd - I've never seen this in my fandom circles. I guess we're in very different fannish environments!

This makes your concern less irrational, but it doesn't, I think, justify the extent to which you overthink it. You sound like overanalysing stuff and worrying about all the (actually pretty insignificant) what-if scenarios is something you're accustomed to doing. (Or I may be projecting, because that's one of my own problems).

In the end, there's nothing to be torn about here. Either you feel about having your works plagiarised strongly enough to never consider publishing your stories, or you don't. Apart from self-publishing, there aren't any good solutions for you.

[(Anonymous)]

It's so weird, I have never had to write an assignment I could have adapted Fanfic for (university level literature & culture studies). Is this an American thing?

[dreemyweird]

As I've mentioned to a person downthread, you get a lot of similar tasks in IB English LangLit! Back in the day, I completed a few assignments I could easily post on AO3 as fanfiction.

[(Anonymous)]

American here

Not an Eng/Creative Writing major but, never in my k-12 education did we do any creative writing beyond poems and haikus
A couple of my friends had to write a short story for one of their teachers but as far as I know, no one ever had some sort of assignment that even remotely resembled fanfiction

[(Anonymous)]

No. With the possible exception dreemyweird noted (which I personally never heard of before she mentioned it), this is not an actual thing. Which makes OP's concern a little more paranoid than it already is.

[(Anonymous)]

It can be done in creative writing classes. All they have to do is swap out the names and tweak a few things.

[(Anonymous)]

Any creative writing teacher worth his/her salt would be able to pick this up in a heartbeat. It's not just names that are a dead giveaway in fanfiction.

[(Anonymous)]

Depends how AU it is.

[(Anonymous)]

Most teachers I had warned us they'd be googling phrases from our assignments. And since at least one person got caught, they weren't lying. I have a hard time believing that so few teachers take such a basic precaution that there's any sort of widespread use of AO3 as a "free homework" engine.

Not to mention, there are so many easier classes out there, most of the people who are in a creative writing class are there because they actually want to write, and improve. This sort of thing sounds way more likely in a lit course where, again, fic won't work even if it's tweaked. Meta maybe. But not fic.

[(Anonymous)]

When I was in high school, we were assigned to write historical fiction (so, basically fanfic) about an author or artist of our choice. I've known a couple of people in college who have been assigned similar things, but I don't think it comes up very often.

[(Anonymous)]

If you're a creative writing major, you submit fiction for class. I took one of my unpublished fics, changed the names and adapted it for a class once. It was an AU so the universe and premise wasn't the same either. Anyway, yeah, fiction workshops require stories.

[(Anonymous)]

European, and regularly used fanfic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off (my own fanfics, obviously) in my creative writing portfolio. As an undergrad, I was submitting assignments in the 2,500-10,000 word range, so that covers a huge amount of one-shot fanfics.

And this was a few years ago now, but I'm pretty sure none of my professors had any idea about fanfic at all, let alone would consider it as a potential avenue for plagiarism. Unless it was traditionally published in some form or another, it wouldn't have crossed their mind to wonder whether a piece had been lifted from someone's fanfic.