“I can steal from you, but don’t you DARE steal from me!” Part 2

UPDATE 6-3-06: I offered to remove this post if "Shadow Of The Wolf" took her fanfiction, which violated the copyright of novelist Lydia Joyce, off-line. She did. So I have removed my post as well.

18 thoughts on ““I can steal from you, but don’t you DARE steal from me!” Part 2”

  1. Oh please. Just drop the entry. It won’t kill you. I understand your dislike for fanfiction, but this is really getting out of hand now.

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  2. Alright. You all have had your fun. Now it’s time for Lee to take this down. My fan fiction has been removed from all the internet sites that they had been posted on. And you can tell your friends who are also mocking me with their own blogs, that they can remove their’s as well. Especially the one who wrote that completely disgusting paradoy of a story that I had written as a public apology to my parents for being a fairly rotten child and disrespecting them through out my young life.
    Now before you all go off and dance and brag over your victory, the removal of my stories occured not because of you. I had been debating taking them down for a while now, because they starting to become a major hinderence to my school work. I need to concentrate on getting through school and improving my artwork if I want to have a decent job as an animator someday.
    Before you go off on me about “still not getting it”, I fully understand and respect the copyrights of others. My little threat was meant to be nothing more than a joke. I realize I should have been more careful with my choice of words.
    I hope you all had a good laugh, I did. A laugh at all of you. You have proved to me that people are cruel enough to band together and embarass a single person whom they don’t even know, over something so trivial as a joke of a lawsuit threat. I’m fully convinced that this world is doomed to self-destruction with such people inhabiting it.

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  3. “Ah, the “I was only joking” defense. Smooth.”
    Me and Scotty Winkler used that one the time we got caught dropping a deuce in the front seat of the vice principal’s car in the sixth grade. I looked Mr. Evans right in the eye and said, “Can’t you take a joke, man?” I swear to God I did.
    I gotta go.

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  4. If you publish something — anything — on the internet or otherwise, you have to accept the consequences. Which will often be that someone who dislikes what you’ve written will criticize it. And you have no control over what they’ll say.
    This is perfectly fair — if you wrote a novel and someone wrote a scathing review of it in the newspaper, how much of a retraction would you expect to get? Would you expect the newspaper to pull every single copy of that edition printed?
    Putting your work on the internet is like pasting it to a bulletin board; anyone who wanders by can read it, not just the people who approve of your message. And the internet has a very, very long memory and once you’ve exposed your work on it, you can’t take it back. Check the Wayback Machine or Google cache, for example.
    It’s embarrassing, yes. I’m absolutely positive I wouldn’t want my adolescent writings on the internet, which is why they’re not posted there.
    Since you’ve made that mistake, you have to take a deep breath, decide if you want to be a Real Writer some day, and try to develop a sense of humor about it either way. Because there’s not much else you can do.
    Your writing is NOT *you*; if you decide to write something original, and you really work at fixing the basic mistakes you’ve displayed, your next work won’t be anything to be embarrassed by.

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  5. How can you say that you “respect the copyrights of others” when you are in the process of violating them? Isn’t that kind of like insisting that you’re on a strict diet through a mouthfull of butter?

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  6. “Alright. You all have had your fun. Now it’s time for Lee to take this down.”
    Don’t you love the way this kid and “Yoli” lecture Lee like they are his mother and he’s their misbehaving kid? What makes them think they can boss him around?
    Morons.

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  7. It’s a pity Shadow-of-the-Wolf can’t spell, and doesn’t have her punctuation under control. It matters. Both of these failures weaken meaning and make communication imprecise.

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  8. From the post, SotW is obviously a student. Too many of our kids grew up being fed the nonsense of “self-esteem”. They grow up thinking everything they do is golden.
    The big, bad world is cruel. Particularly to writers.
    And before anyone turns Lee’s blog into a self esteem forum, I went to Catholic school in the 60’s. It was common punishment to be made to stand in the trash can and pray for forgiveness. That destroys self esteem. Not honest criticism of a teacher.

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  9. Those of you demolishing fellow human beings – for whatever reason – deserve to stand in the trash can. Educate; do not go ad hominem.

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  10. Professional writers should all have thick skins and be able to shrug off criticism and cruel remarks disguised as wit without psychic damage.
    However.
    Warren’s First Law of Criticism states that critical remarks say much more about the critic than they do about the work being criticized.
    There is no skill in shooting down easy targets like young writers of fanfic, who are categorically not professionals. Furthermore, any attack ad hominem isn’t really literary criticism at all, since it addresses itself to the originator and not to the work.
    I know that someone will make an objection on the grounds that a writer of fan fiction is violating the law, and on those grounds, is a criminal and so a legitimate target for vilifying comments. The truth, however, is that no matter how you personally may feel about it, free fanfic has not yet been defined as illegal by the courts.
    And let’s face it: fans are created by us legitimate writers, and we might want to be a little pleased that our characters seem so real to them that they fantasize about them and even share their fantasies. Most fanfic is puerile and poorly written and poses no threat to us as professionals at all. It is beneath us to react as if it did.
    So the worst thing you can actually accuse Shadow-of-the-Wolf of is poor judgment. She has done the right thing by taking down her fanfic, and Lee has likewise done the right thing by putting it to rest. There’s no need to hurl any insults at anyone, at least, not in public. Time to move on.

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  11. I offered to remove this post if “Shadow Of The Wolf” took her fanfiction, which violated the copyright of novelist Lydia Joyce, off-line. She did. So I have removed my post as well.
    Re: I’ll be honest there is no way I would
    ever remove one of the Fanfiction stories I have written ever.Copyright or no. I make no money on the stories or snippets I write and have stated that I don’t own them. And no I brake no laws so hell no I would not remove my stuff because some writer complains about it!

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  12. “And no I brake no laws.” Oh God, what an imbecile.
    “There is no way I would ever remove one of the Fanfiction stories I have written ever. Copyright or no.”
    Can you imagine what this person’s stories must be like? He or she can’t even write a literate sentence!
    If this represents what the writers and readership of fanfiction are like…it’s beyond pathetic. It’s literature for the illiterate by the illiterate.
    This is what happens when you cut spending on education in America.

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