liz_marcs | Jesus Christ. Caught Plagiarizing. Again.

Current Mood: irate

Jesus Christ. Caught Plagiarizing. Again.

How many of you out there remember Ozmandayus, the Buffy/Xander and sometime Faith/Xander writer who got caught plagiarizing from fics in the X-Files to write his smut? He was also caught doing the same in Smallville, Dark Angel, and Power Rangers fandoms.

Remember how he apologized, dropped off the radar for a while, changed his name to Shawn, and re-entered with a note of apology and promises that he'll never do it again?

Guess what. He's done it again.

Same fandom. Same pairings.

I missed the initial post about this on

stop_plagiarism, but caught today's follow-up post about it.

Worst of all, the specific instance of plagiarism was found in a story in the I Need a Parrot Archive.

Rest assured, I've pinged

whiskyinmind about it. It appears I still have my Modly Powers still active on INAP, but as I've been really, really, really remiss about performing my duties over there for at least 6 months, and since

whiskyinmind actually owns the archive, I'm letting her make the call.

[Please note: I JUST pinged whiskyinmind on this about 5 minutes ago, and she has limited access to a computer. It may take up to a week for this issue with Shawn to get resolved. I guarantee that the offending story is gone for sure.] —

whiskyinmind agreed with me and had me nuke his INAP account. See below for more details.

If it were up to me, I'd nuke all of his stories from the archive, rather than just the offending one where he was caught with his fingers in the plagiarism pie. (Again. Jesus Christ!)

To give him credit, it appears that he's raiding non-fandom original fic stories posted on the net, rather than other fandom stories. That's a marginally smarter way to go about it. I guess.

As for why I'm so completely pissed off about the whole deal (as opposed to my more than usual pissy responses to such things) is that I've been wrestling my

apocabigbang for months. Not weeks. Months. And it's been like pulling teeth from a grizzly bear while it's trying to eat me.

Needless to say, this news about Ozmandays/Shawn pulling the same ol' bullshit these many years later after already being caught once does not make my day.

And here I was going to post good news to my ElJay about fic award nominations and such, but I think I'd rather save it until tomorrow when I'm slightly less livid about this.

He did it again.

Jesus Christ.

P.S. — Revenge of the Pissed off INAP Mods: Per

whiskyinmind's orders, I have nuked every single one of Shawn's stories off of INAP, locked his account, and sent him the following email explaining our reasons. As for permabanning him, I'm not sure how to do that, so I'm leaving that for

whiskyinmind to work her computer magic on.

Please note: There is no appeal for this decision.

Note to Shawn under the cut explaining the reasons why he's no longer welcome on INAP:

Shawn,
Please note that we have been informed that your story "Blessed" was plagiarized from a Literotica story called "It Started with a Kiss" by Miss Honeypot.

For more details, here is the initial charge from the stop_plagiarism community on LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/stop_plagiarism/104200.html

And here is the final judgment on the matter: http://community.livejournal.com/stop_plagiarism/107883.html

As you have a history of plagiarizing stories in the past, we are hereby deleting all of your stories from INAP, effective immediately. There is no appeal for this action.

Furthermore, we are immediately locking your account and the site administrator will see to it that you are banned on a permanent basis from INAP. There is also no appeal for this action.

Back when you initially opened your account, it is fair to say that we had very grave reservations about allowing you to do so. We even had a debate about it. In the end, despite knowing your past, we were willing to give you a second chance.

We chose to believe you when you said you were sorry about your past plagiarism. We chose to believe you when you said that you had turned over a new leaf and that you would never plagiarize again.

We did it with great trepidation, mind you, but we still did it.

What’s even worse, the story “Blessed” was posted to our archive in September 2005, roughly 6 months after your re-entry back into fandom with your apologetic letter.

While we are not sorry that we took a second chance on you, we are rather upset (not to mention furious) to discover that our trust has not only been sorely misplaced, but that you couldn’t even go a year before resorting to plagiarism.

Please refrain from posting to INAP again. Your stories are not welcome.

You are perma-banned. There is no appeal.

Sincerely,
Lizbeth Marcs, on behalf of the INAP Administrators

Now I'll go inform the initial reporter that we've banned Shawn from INAP at least...

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I just saw her Twitter. She wants him off NOW, and said to give you a holler.

HOW DOES HE THINK HE CAN GET AWAY WITH THIS?!

Tell her that I will promptly nuke all of this stories.

(I wan't him off my site now. And i won't be able to do it myself for another 15 hrs)

Tell her that I'm promptly nuking his stories.

And I've sent him an email that I'll post as a PEE-ESS on my entry.

Thanks for playing Paul Revere on this one. :-)

Please send her a link to my post.

That way, she'll have a record that his stories are deleted, his account is locked, and the email I sent him.

Thanks so much for your help!

Sent! Glad to be of assistance while otherwise languishing on sickbed.

Sheesh unbelievable.

Oh for. Why. Would. You. Do. That. I mean granted I don't know why anyone would deliberately plagiarize to begin with, but after getting caught and supposedly being sorry about it?

Worse, he did it less than SIX MONTHS after that apology.

He's been nuked from INAP, and I sent him a very firmly worded email telling him way.

I'm positively livid right now.

Wow that boy is DUMB! What a moron. I remember his huge apology post on some of the newsgroups that I read. Wow. What an a$$wad!

Amen.

He's been sumarily nuked from INAP as a result.

He's not welcome back.

Like a dog returning to its vomit.

I once had a student who I caught plagiarising for an essay. One of the obvious sort of cases where the language is the sort of thing you don't see undergrads using, and where a quick Google easily finds the website he got it from.

Next year, when he was retaking the class, I'd set an essay that was on the same general topic, though a different question - and not only did he plagiarise again, he plagiarised from the same website.

He'd also plagiarised for another class, but luckily for him this was judged as two second offences rather than a third which would have got him automatically kicked off his degree. Didn't take him long to flunk enough classes to get kicked off anyway (which believe me at my Uni was a pretty hard thing to do.)

Moral of the story - people who are not only dumb enough that they need to plagiarise, but dumb enough that they get caught at it, are generally really, really dumb.

Well, I hope this guy gets thoroughly nuked from all the relevant sites as soon as can be managed.

He's definitely off INAP, permanently if it can be done.

I had a sneaking suspicion that he'd do it again, but just be smarter about it. Frankly, I think everyone involved with INAP did, too.

I hate that we were right. Not surprised, really, but I do hate it.

The only good thing about this is that I don't think Shawn is popular enough any more that this business will cause the level of wank it did the first go-round of this.

I just don't see the point of plagiarising fic. Non-fiction, sure. There's the "profit motive"--easy way to write a term paper, pad out your popular history without doing the hard work of research and interpretation, etc. I admit that, under the gun, I more than paraphrased _Bright and Shining Lie_ while doing a school assignment after choosing the Battle of Ahn Bac as the subject. On the other hand, I did refer to it as a source in footnotes. Not a proud moment in my scholastic career, mind.

In the case of fic, it's a puzzled "why bother?" The reason you write is the pleasure (often accompanied by agony) of somehow translating the images in your head on paper/screen. Lifting entire passages and reworking them slightly to present them as your own doesn't even feel like cheating. It feels like unsatisfying work for nothing. There's zero sense of accomplishment besides garnering comment-whore points.

I've aped authorial voices (ah, my Clancy/Forsyth phase), re-used canon lines of dialogue in fic as shout-outs, etc. All acceptable within the "honour among thieves" code we fanfic writers work under. Plagiarism just seems silly.

Profit in fandom is a little different: measured in popularity and in feedback.

Ozymandus was popular, and by popular I mean MONSTER POPULAR back in the day. If you said you didn't like Ozymandus back in the day, you'd get mobbed up for it. I never much liked his stories, mostly because I don't like PWP (which was the majority of his output) and his non-PWP weren't all that special. Not to mention that Xander and whatever woman his was banging this week was OOC in the extreme.

(I take it back. There was one story of his I did like, and it was a ficlet character study of Xander teaching Dawn how to drive that was kind of sweet and actually in character. I can't tell you if that was plagiarized or not.)

So, needless to say, I kept my mouth shut when he was mobbed with love from all corners of B/X, F/X, and Xander-centric fandom.

He lost a lot of his popularity when he was found out, and then when he started posting under Shawn, he regained some fans but was mostly on the periphery. I think he pretty much retreated to his own Yahoo Group and posted completes stories on the archives.

So, yeah, if he's to be believed, the massive amounts of adulation he got from the Xander-centric, F/X, and B/X crowd was what fueled his desire to keep producing more and more and more stories (especially PWPs) and his inability to produce as much as the "market" demanded is what let him into plagiarizing across fandoms.

Yeah, not a rational reason, but at least it's a reason.

As for why do it in this second go-round? That's the real mystery.

I can't believe anyone could be that stupid. Twice. Talk about entitled arrogance, and absolutely agree, get the weasel off all archives.

His account's been nuked from orbit.

And yeah, I can believe he'd be that stupid. Twice.

P.S. Jesus Christ says, "Hey, don't blame me, I had nothing to do with it."

*rereads title of post*

*falls over laughing*

In fact, Jesus wept.

I did wonder how long it would be before he started plagiarising again, though I did think he would go about it differently as the first time he got caught he had been doing it quite intelligently in plagiarising from a different fandom from the one he was writing in.

Actually, he wasn't even plagiarizing fanfic this time. He was plagiarizing original fic on Literotica, which I admit is smart. If he plagiarized from commercially published novels, he'd be in deep shit. Also, there might be some Literotica writers who might not feel comfortable coming forward if it got back to them that they'd been plagiarized elsewhere on the Net. (As it was, this was a third-party complaint...)

But like you, I think all of us on INAP figured it was only a matter of time before he got caught again, especially since he still had that erratic writing style.

So he plagiarizes on a site that he knows is aware that he has plagiarized in the past?

Moron.

Sadly, we missed it. It's thanks to

stop_plagiarism that it got caught.

But, yeah, there is a high moron quotient there for doing the exact same crap in the exact same fandoms that he did before involving the exact same group of fans.

To give him credit, though, he targeted stories where there was likely to be not a whole lot of crossover between readers.

Wow, what an idiot. How did he not realize that you guys would be watching him like the proverbial hawk for any misbehavior?

Sadly, we didn't catch him. The story was posted in 2005 and it's been on the archive for awhile.

It's just lucky that I belong to the

stop_plagiarism community and happened to spot today's follow-up.

It just so happens that we've been waiting for something like this to come out almost since he created the account.

Also, I know we've deleted plagiarized stories in the past, but let people keep their accounts and other stories. Because of his past infractions, we decided to nuke his account from orbit rather than give him the benefit of the doubt for a third time.

Edited 2010-02-28 23:51 (UTC)

Wow, what a blast from the past. I TOTALLY remember this guy! What. The. Hell? I have no idea what he must've been thinking.

Clearly he wasn't.

I just have no idea what to make of this at all. I just don't get it.

Does he think he's Helene Hegemann? What is the world coming to?

Shakatany

Gaaah. Good thing you caught him.

Um. Wow! Again? Really? Isn't this his 100th time going through the whole caught, denial, apologizing, disappearing, reappearing, being all contrite, starting over & promising to be honest this time routine?

I'm happy he pretty much left Buffy fandom. I don't find this news as upsetting as I did years ago. I'm still mad that he did it. What he did is very wrong, but it doesn't have the same impact as it did the first 2 or 3 times. When the shit hit the fan about his plagiarism years ago, it was so disturbing, heart breaking, and devastating to the slowly dying B/X portion of fandom that one of our leaders and only consistent fic writers was guilty of plagiarism.

I'm actually not even surprised this time. If I remember correctly, the first few times he was caught, he just changed his user name, email address and yahoo group name and said that people wrongly accused him of something he didn't do. He told everyone not to believe the rumors about him on other boards. I naively believed him. Twice! Shame on me. In my defense, I was new to fandom and fanfic. I never saw the accusations and was never given any links to the original fic. I only heard about the situation through him. It was also during the time when Xander writers were being targeted, flamed, and randomly kicked off FF.net. Remember those good times? I think he hid behind that whole conspiracy. The most recent time he was caught, we were provided with links to the plagiarized fic. The evidence was there and it was upsetting. I know many didn't like him or his fic, but he was a leader in BX fandom. Maybe he thought producing fic, even plagiarized fic was helping keep B/X fandom alive, but I think it ended up hurting it more than helping. I felt so angry and betrayed by this person I had never met and maybe exchanged a few emails with. Not this time though.

"Blessed" is still up at FF.net. I just reported him.

Damn. I guess some leopards can't change their spots.

I think, as it was said once in _Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets_ (probably): "criminals are stupid".

It helps if you imagine a FicWank Internet Police Unit detective in the form of John Munch saying it.

Thank you so much for catching this and contacting me. I've been horribly remiss about modding on the site as well. Definitely going to be paying much more attention from now on! (and if you're still willing to I'd appreciate the help?)

I am absolutely furious that he's done this again.

I was weak to give him a second chance, never again.

It would be nice if fandom was the nice, polite place we all wish it was. Sadly, we have to deal with stuff like this, and I'm very sorry y'all had to deal with it. Such things are never fun.

One of the worst arguments I ever had with my best friend happened when she was amused at fanfic writers getting upset about plagarism. I couldn't beleive I had to explain the difference between plagarism and copyright infringement to her.

I still remember just how goddamn outraged this guy was when he was accused of being a plagiarist years ago, and I never understood why he was given a second chance. I could see maybe if he got caught and said "Oh man, I really shouldn't have done that, my bad, everyone." Maybe you give that guy another chance.

But the guy who immediately acts all indignant and insults his accusers? He doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. I'm glad he's banned for good this time, because he's just a shithead of epic proportione, and I kind of hate the people who felt sorry for him last time.

Some people are just jackasses, and that's all they will ever be.

If I ever met him, I would have a difficult time restraining my violent impulses. There are few things in this world that piss me off as much as a plagiarist.

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Jesus Christ. Caught Plagiarizing. Again.

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