Confessions of a Plagiarized Author

Or, “I’m Not Anonymous!”

Once upon a time I was vice-president of the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in Paonia, Colorado and one of my duties was to organize the annual lecture series. I normally liked the chore, but sometimes I had bad chemistry with the proposed speaker and because I am a petty, small-minded man I would then drag my heels on every little task, promote the event ineffectively, kvetch endlessly, and generally make an ass of myself. Even so, I always attended the lectures and on one occasion, listening to the introductory comments from a speaker who had particularly grated on me, I was astonished to hear him relating an essay… that I had written. The piece is titled Confessions of a Heavy Thinker, and is posted below.

So I basically sat and fumed for the duration of the talk, and then accosted the speaker immediately after he concluded. His response was simple and disarming: ‘Oh, did you write that? I found it on the internet.’ Even more discomforting was the prompt exclamation of someone listening in: ‘You wrote that? Somebody emailed it to me a couple of weeks ago!’

Have you Christians no shame?

Subsequent googling confirmed my fears: apparently I had had 15 minutes of internet fame and hadn’t even been aware of it. I wrote the piece in 1989, and it first appeared, under a pseudonym, in the June 1st New Times, an alternative paper (quite a good one) in San Luis Obispo County, California—in fact, it was my first publication of note. It appeared another three times in New Times—under my name, these times—because the owner/editor, Steve Moss, liked it and it was his paper, and it also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, under my name. Somewhere along the way Confessions of a Heavy Thinker leapt to the internet, apparently shorn of any attribution to me… that or it was stolen. At any rate, it appears on several hundred sites, always without my name attached, and occasionally claimed as the fruit of another’s authorial loins. Here are some examples:

Curtis Dahlgren doesn’t claim to be the author of my work, but he does copy it shamelessly, and twists it—by substituting a few words—to slam liberals. Well, it was written by a liberal; suck on that, Curt. And yes, please remit to me any monies received for copying my work.

The ‘author’ of Confessions of a Quackbuster, a shitty abandoned blog, copies my work, appears to take credit for it, and adds a graceless, incoherent addendum that twists it to his purposes. I’m sounding a little angry, aren’t I?

One A. James Dehayes uses my piece in a newsletter, and says he heard Steve Brown read it on Key Life Network, a Christian radio producer. Fie on you, Key Life! Have you Christians no shame?

Another Christian, Bryan Patterson, who publishes a column in Australian newspapers, published my piece as his writing. Dick.

Oh, and some guy named Gene Stone published it on Huffington Post. At least he didn’t change it, or take credit for it.

My feelings are of course complicated. On the one hand, I am an author and of course I want the credit which properly belongs to me and of course I despise those who plagiarized and adapted my writing without permission. Especially the ‘faithworks’ guy. Chumps. And, pathetically, I want every bit of Google love and every single link generated to somehow be directed, now, to me. But on the other hand, I’m rather proud that it did so well on its own, as one is rather proud of the hitherto unknown illegitimate child who turns out to have become a doctor. At any rate, I here claim Confessions of a Heavy Thinker as my own original creation and call out my plagiarists as, well… I guess calling them plagiarists is bad enough. If they are decent, they will apologize for their heinous sin, withdraw their copies of my work, provide a link to its appearance on my blog, and remit any compensation received to me. Thanks for reading my hissy fit.

cheers,
Angus

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