Saturday, April 17, 2010

Plagarism is the Highest Form of Flattery

I'm absolutely livid about this, and yet at the same time, I find it incredibly hilarious. How do you know your writing is good? Someone else want to rip it off and try to pass it off as their own. I have now been the victim of plagarism three times over, by one complete moron.

Name and Shame time: The idiot in question is Xenoz I. I've conveniently linked to his profile here so you can send him whatever messages you deem appropriate.

What did he steal? From me, he took my Metro 2033, Modern Warfare 2, and Mass Effect 2 reviews. From Webb, he stole FFXIII and Just Cause 2. From jackanape, Bioshock 2. Those are just the ones I know about. Apparently, this dude posted up a LOT of reviews, so we probably had even more stolen than that. The site they appeared on is www.readyuplive.com. Their community manager send me a friend request on Live and we discussed the situation over a party chat.

I was able to confirm for him (Everyone send SourNotHardcore thank you letters LOL) that those were our reviews from x360a. It wasn't hard... THEY WERE DIRECT COPY/PASTE JOBS (epic, epic fail), down to the exact same pictures and captions. Though he actually changed my scores! Metro went from a 76/100 to an 8.5/10 LMFAO.

It's not hard to check for Copy/Paste plagarism. Copy just ONE sentence of any of my reviews into Google. If it links you to anywhere but X360a, someone jacked my review. With the amount of time I put into those, it's not like I'm going to forget my words.

The stolen content has already been taken down, and that moron has lost his rights to "write" reviews... and hopefully will get worse to boot. Apparently, he even claimed he was me. Oh no you didn't! Kudos to ReadyUpLive's staff for being proactive about looking into this and resolving the situation. I respect and appreciate that.

What's the silver lining in this? If my reviews sucked, nobody would want to steal them, so I must be decent, at least =)

5 comments:

  1. I've had this same problem with a few of my achievement guides. I was notified by PM on x360a that my guide was on the xbox.com forums and somebody else claimed it was theirs. Well I notified one of the mods and had a few people post in the particular thread defending me. Like your "admirer" the person just simply copied and pasted my guide from x360a.

    I was like you, I was upset, but luckily the guide was removed from the forums. You spend all the hard work writing guides, or in your case reviews and then somebody claims it's theirs, it just makes you a little upset.

    Anyway, sorry for overtaking your post Thrawn. Glad that the reviews got removed. How did you find this out though, did you just google one of your reviews sentences, or were you notified of the plagiarism?

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  3. I was notified by their community manager. I'm just saying copy/paste plagarism is way too easy to check out.

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  4. I found a video of me on Youtube of somebody claiming to be me doing a trick on a skateboard, I was pretty shocked haha.

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  5. I suppose I'd care more if the site was one I'd heard of, ha ha!

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