Hiding Secrets in Plain Sight

Every once in a while, on here, we come across someone who is not at all what they pretend to be.  It's good to keep in mind this can always be the case, and most of us do take everything and everyone with a grain of salt.  But sometimes it's so blatant, and I wonder how in the world they think no one will find out.

There was an incident a while back where the person even posted a well-known email forward as something that had happened in her own life.  Almost everyone who read it was raising eyebrows about that one.  Many of us had gotten it as an email forward, and knew the truth of it, but when questioned she kept insisting it was her own experience and photos, meanwhile working to cover the truth, and attempting to get people to believe her by posting even more stolen pictures that were not what she claimed and we could all plainly see it.

One of many people that particular person copied entire articles from out on the web, and tried to pass off as her own, here, used the program Copyscape, which searches for duplications of copyrighted work and notifies the owner if infringement happens.  That person was one of many who notified Gather what this other person was doing.  I think many people get away with it a time or ten, and think they are safe, but all it takes is ripping off the wrong person, one too many times, to get your account here closed, or find yourself in legal trouble. Copyscape, or, TinEye, which can find duplications of photos or graphics, and even Google, are just a few of the tools that make this easy.  As Gather has said, they have a three strikes policy.  But if you have ten or twenty (or more) stolen items in your account, and even a fraction of them get caught, boom, there you go. And all your connections are wondering "Whatever happened to ____ ."

There are a lot of people who take Gather's suggestion to notify the copyright holder if  you see a suspected infringement.  I don't even know them all.  That's what Gather advised we do if we find or suspect this is going on, because they don't act on that sort of issue unless the copyright holder is the one notifying them.

Some have expressed the opinion that instead of talking to the copyright holder, people should first talk to the copyright infringer.  The problem is, that almost never goes well.  No matter how polite you are in letting people know what Gather says about copyright and what we post here, or that we opt not to connect, stay connected, or accept items to our group because it's not their original content, they get mad, and lash out, and usually try to cover the truth if we've said it publicly.

Yesterday, a former connection deleted the whole article to cover the truth, which is that almost all of her "articles" are stolen from elsewhere.  She only deleted the one I made the comment on, though, not everything she'd stolen.  It seems only the chit-chat articles she posts are her own.  But she removes all identifying markers that she can, to cover this fact.  She's not confused about copyright, it's deliberate.  However, anyone who reads someone for a while will generally get an idea of that person's "voice" - and I noticed that hers was all over the place.  One voice for her chit-chat articles, a million others for everything else.

When I saw her describe herself in language I knew she would not use, I spent 30 seconds with google and found where she's taking most of her items from, lately.  (I'm not going to post her name, and I don't want you to, either, if you know or figure it out, because I want this article to stand.)

In just the first page of articles posted on gather by this person, there are five stolen articles from TheFrisky.com.  Five.  From a variety of authors.  That's already a ticking time-bomb to get an account closed, and we haven't even flipped into a previous page of articles yet, or included anything taken from anywhere else.

And she probably thinks her secret is safe because she deleted the article, and with it my comment. 

But my response is this - people DO notice, and it's very easy to prove article theft like this.  You can delete my comment, and I will repost it, if not on your items, then in its own article.  And if you delete the article, so that I have no screenshot, you still cannot make me not know, and not speak, the truth.  There's no getting the cat back into that bag.

I'll leave you with Gather's words on copyright, taken from the tab Copyright and Content ownership, beside the editor in which we all post:

You're responsible for any content you share on Gather, so you should only share content you created or for which you can provide written permission from the copyright owner. Remember: you automatically own the copyright for content you create. If you share content you didn't create or for which you don't have permission, you may be violating copyright laws and Gather's Terms of Service.