Judy Gill On Why Plagiarism is Theft, Plain and Simple

Please welcome Judy Gill, author of A Father for Philip, to the blog!

There’s been a fair bit of talk lately about plagiarism, which as most of us know, without the fancy term is theft, plain and simple. To me, it’s the same as calling rape “sexual assault.” Yes, there are lower degrees of sexual assault than rape, but as a woman I resent having that total violation of any person’s body lumped in with patting a butt or squeezing a boob. As an author, I also resent the term “plagiarism”, which can be anything from stealing a paragraph from another author’s book and sticking it in your own, to wholesale theft of entire novels, and that’s what’s happening right now. The thieves find novels online, “scrape” that is copy and paste and reformat, maybe change the character names and slap on a different cover and by-line, then rush out and sell it as a Kindle edition.

There are sites all over telling people how they can make up to a few thousand bucks a day with no work, which suggests there must be a lot of people who think that’s okay—otherwise the owners of those sites wouldn’t stay in business long. Some of those sites tell visitors how to go about stealing other people’s work. The thieves who steal from authors are not authors. They are not even writers. They are well-organized, completely ruthless smash-and grab operators no different from masked men using a crowbar on a jewelry store window and scooping up what they can. Some people believe that to be a victimless crime because the jewelry is all insured. Apart from the fallacy of that argument, when it comes to stealing from authors, the thought that it’s “a victimless crime” is completely wrong. Authors are not insured.

This brings me to another set of victims of this crime—the readers themselves. The self-publishing industry has already developed a bit of a bad reputation because so many books with unbelievable plots, bad spelling and grammar, and almost unreadable formatting have been flung against the fan, unedited. If the trend toward pirated books continues unabated, honest readers will lose even more faith in the online-book industry. I believe most people, in fact the vast majority, prefer not to buy things that “fell off the back of a truck,” or hand off their hard-earned money to thieves.

My suggestion to readers is to check out the author if you’re unfamiliar with his name but

think the book might interest you. Most legitimate authors have publishers and/or websites with photos, bios, and contact information and perhaps a list of creds on Google. Of course, the unscrupulous thieves (that, I know is a syntactical redundancy, but I couldn’t resist), can set up websites, post bios and photos, but they probably won’t bother because they believe the readers won’t bother. Well, in addition to being an author, I’m also an avid reader and believe me, I do check.

 

Judy Griffith Gill (who has a website, a bio, and plenty of publishing credits to her name), is a member of Novelists, Inc. an international organization of multi-published fiction authors. She has many of her backlist titles currently online through Open Road Media, and is working on reinventing a half-dozen more. These last were originally published under a variety of names and are classed as “traditional” or “sweet” romances, with the sex behind closed doors. The first of those, A Father for Philip, is available now in

Kindle format. In addition to that project, she is working on the third book in a four book Speculative Fiction series, to be published at intervals when all are ready.

Have you ever been the victim of plagiarism? Or know someone who has? Share your experiences below!

P.S. - We're only days away from the release of book 3 of the Stark Trilogy!!  Have you pre-ordered Complete Me yet?

P.P.S. And why not scroll down and share the post? After all, sharing is sexy!

XXOO

--J.K.