dwasifar's daily gripe

Everything I publish here is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. Basically this means anyone is free to use it, share it, or adapt it as they like, as long as they credit me for the original work and don’t use it commercially.

I bring this up because I had a plagiarism issue arise recently, for the first time in almost two years of blogging here.

A reader notified me in the comments of one of my Ubuntu how-to tutorials that he believed someone had “ripped me off.”  I followed the link and found an article in a forum that was clearly my work with a little bit of rewording and some spelling errors added.  Same structure, same paragraph breaks, same sentence sequence, and the code sections were letter-for-letter identical.  When I was a kid, students used to copy articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica and just change words here and there to make it not identical.  I imagine kids today do it with Wikipedia.  Anyway, it looked like that, and there was no attribution given; the guy was presenting it as his own work.  So I posted a message in that thread complaining about it and giving a link to my original article.  The writer shot back with indignant claims that he had never seen my article and didn’t appreciate being accused.  We knocked it back and forth for a post or two and then I finally said, I’m not buying it, and other people can read both links, look at the posting dates, and draw their own conclusions.  Five minutes later the entire thread was gone.

That would probably have been the end of it, except that I shortly discovered the guy had also posted it to a different area on the forum, and that post was still there.  So I sent him email saying, look, this stuff is CC licensed, all you need to do is add attribution and everything will be fine.  After sending that, I starting getting tired of the whole thing.  I figured, screw it; these tutorials are meant to help people, and even if he is a jerk, his derivative work is helping spread the information.  So I sent him a second email telling him I was letting it go and he had permission to use the work.

And that probably would have been the end of it, except that he couldn’t let it go.  I’m guessing he saw my willingness to compromise as evidence that I had doubts, and he fired back with a big ol’ hate-mail full of indignant blustering and threats.  He reiterated his claim that his work was original, and that he had never seen my article before writing it.  He told me he had just visited my blog and was upset about the “defamatory” comments he found there.  He claimed he had removed the first thread so that it wouldn’t sully his reputation.  (My feeling about that is, if he really believed the articles were unrelated and I was full of shit, then he should have left the thread in place with the link to my article, and everyone could have seen how full of shit I was for themselves.)  Then he started yammering about bringing attorneys into it, to sue me for slander and defamation of character.  He instructed me to direct any further communication to his attorney, without actually telling me who that might be.

This is always where things get funny.

First of all, it’s my experience that threats to sue are almost always empty.  People who are going to sue you just sue. The rest is just talk.  But even if he were serious, people have no idea what the law actually allows for when it comes to these kinds of civil cases.  They think you can just sue anyone who says anything bad about you and win.  Actually the bar is much higher.  First, you have to prove that what was said about you was false.  Then you have to prove that the person who said it knew it was false, and said it maliciously.  Finally, you have to prove actual damages.  It’s not enough to claim your reputation was damaged; you have to prove that you suffered physical or financial loss as a result.  This guy doesn’t know any of that.  He doesn’t even know the difference between slander and libel.

He’d have a hard time with any of those requirements.  First, he can’t prove it’s false, because it isn’t.  Therefore I have a right to say it.  Truth is an absolute defense against charges of slander or libel.  And even if it weren’t true, it would still be hard for him to show actual damages from a couple of forum comments that were only up for a few minutes before being deleted, or comments on my blog that don’t name him specifically and contain only a dead link to the deleted thread.

Anyway, back to the story.  I was sick of the bluster and bluff from this blowhard and decided to play my ace.  I sent him back an email informing him that although he was still free to use his adapted work, he should stop jabbering about lawyers, because I had his IP address, and my server logs showed that he had accessed my article five days before he posted his. Thus, his claim never to have seen my article before was a provable lie.  (Yes, I know someone’s going to say something about dynamic IPs; I don’t want to go into how I know that’s not the case here, but I do know.)  I advised him to shut up and go away and be happy I was letting him get away with it.  I have not heard anything since.

The bottom line is that this guy tried to pass off my work as his, got caught, lied himself into a corner, then tried to bluff his way out.  Didn’t work.  I’m not surprised at how it went down, in retrospect; after reading some of the things in his online profile, I should have known this was not a man who would ever admit a mistake even if he was walking around with a bucket of shit stuck on his foot.  I’ll admit to one, though: it was a mistake for me to offer a compromise.  To someone like that, a compromise offer is seen as admission of weakness.

I find myself analyzing my own reactions.  Why was I so protective of my work?  What did it matter if he swiped it?  It’s not like it cost me money.  I would have been fine with it if he had followed the attribution requirements of the CC license.  At least some of it was Flame War Syndrome, wherein internet arguments spiral out of control with astonishing swiftness.  But there has to be more to it than that, or I’d have led off less aggressively than I did.  I’m not really sure.

One final note: the user comments on the article in question, including the link to his adaptation, have been removed now.  The link is dead, which makes them comments about nothing, and I don’t want people getting curious about it after reading this post, finding them, and tracking him and his other posting down.  That’s not what this post is about.  I don’t want to reopen the issue with him, but it is an amusing story that I think was worth telling, and it illustrates the larger point that CC licensed work is still licensed.  You don’t have to pay me, but I want my damn attributions!