I Had My First Plagiarism Incident on Medium

Just another unnecessary irritation...

The thing about making money writing is that, ideally, the writer is the one getting paid for her or his work. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Last week I was scrolling through articles under the “racism” tag on Medium, and I found one with a title very similar to this article.

In fact, the title was exactly the same except the word “saw” was replaced with “witnessed.” That’s actually an improvement, but I can’t give the plagiarist credit because I used “witnessed” in another article just a few days ago.

I clicked on the article, started to read it, and my heart sank. It was my story about how a teacher in 4^th grade picked up a kid in his desk and threw him down the stairs. The plagiarized article didn’t even bother to change the names.

In my article, I called the boy “Axle” and in the plagiarized article they went with “Axel.” The funny thing about that is I had to check which spelling was appropriate when I was writing (it turns out they both are).

For the name of the offending teacher, I wanted something that sounded both comical and vaguely intimidating. That’s why I went with Mr. Narwhal. The plagiarist must have thought it was a good idea because, yup, there it was!

It was a very strange experience clicking on this article and starting to read. I can’t remember what they used for a featured image. I do remember skimming through the text and thinking, “Wow, this is garbage!”

I often think that when I read my own writing, but impostor syndrome wasn’t at work here. You see, this wasn’t a cut and paste job, they’d done something to my words. Everything was a little out of order, and the reading experience was simply awful.

I recalled my college textbooks which featured examples of Shakespeare’s plays transcribed from memory. Naturally, these misremembered versions did not do the original justice. They were like reanimated corpses shuffling around and losing bits of themselves.

That’s the way I felt reading this article.

I began to wonder how this had happened? Had the plagiarist run the article through some garbling software to avoid being detected as plagiarism? How does that kind of software work? Is it not considered plagiarism if 80% of the words don’t line up exactly?

“My story is different. Your main character is named A-x-l-e, mine is named A-x-e-l. That’s not the same.”

It’s like the video where Vanilla Ice tries to insist that “Ice, Ice, Baby” is different from “Under Pressure.”

Anyway, I sat there and went, “Unghhh.” Then I set about reporting the story for plagiarism.

Now, reporting people is not something I like to do. I prefer to block them. Last week I wrote about somebody making unreasonable threats about reporting people and how distasteful I found it. But there are some instances where people have to be reported.

Look, if it was just a similar title, I wouldn’t have said anything. If it was an article about a similar concept, I wouldn’t have said anything. In fact, I see articles like that all the time.

But when the article is a start to finish garbled rewrite of something I wrote, I have to report it. So, I found the form on Medium’s page. It requires you to provide the link of the victim article and the link of the accused article, and then you have to wait and see what they decide.

The problem with all of this is that now you’re getting into legal waters, and “here there be monsters.”

One of the most frustrating things about life is that law seems to be written to protect the unlawful. People will put their hands on their hips and scream, “That’s the way it has to be, otherwise we’d live in an oppressive system where you’d be constantly exploited.”

But... we do live in an oppressive system where people are constantly exploited. Maybe we need to rethink how law works?

Anyway, I fully understand that Medium has legal obligations that are exactly the type of thing I don’t like to think about. They sent me a polite note that indicated they had requested that the flagged story be taken down. The note went on to indicate what would happen if the plagiarist protested this decision.

“Wait a minute, protest?” I thought.

But then I settled down and realized, yes, of course the plagiarist would have a right to protest. We do need to have a mechanism within the system to account for false accusations. Okay, that’s fine... that’s fine... that’s fine...

Then, I drifted into a nightmare where I ended up in court and the plagiarist was sitting there with puppy dog eyes, crying about how much my accusation had hurt, and everyone was pointing fingers at me.

Then some scruffy faced lawyer with mean eyes stumbled to the front and said, “But your honor, these stories aren’t the same! In Walter’s story the main character’s name is Axle, in my client’s story the name is Axel. That’s different!”

And then I lose based on that argument because, as much as the judge might want to side with me, his hands are tied.

The problem with anything related to legal matters is that I just don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there (repetition intentional). I don’t want to hire expensive lawyers and sit in an expensive courtroom and be charged for the presence of everyone to misrepresent a bunch of things I don’t want to talk about.

Grrr.....

But I get that this process has to happen. As of yet, I haven’t had any information about a “protest” to my accusation. I blocked the author, so I don’t know if the story has been taken down or not.

Ultimately, this experience was entirely dissatisfying. I doubt that the plagiarist made any money on the garbled version of my article. The plagiarist didn’t have any followers, and I happened to click on it within an hour of its publications. At least the plagiarist knew how to use tags right, which is more than I can say for many human writers.

That’s the weird part here, was this even a human being? Maybe it was just a robot? Can robots do that?

So, I guess the takeaway is to be on the lookout for entities ripping off your stories. I wonder how many more of my articles have zombie doppelgangers haunting the world wide web? Hopefully, I’ll never know.