[ 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

[(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.