So someone REALLY likes "Empty Darkness" >.< · 9:05pm Jul 10th, 2015
Some of you may have heard (through the comments section) that Empty Darkness was stolen by some really intelligent user and posted to their own FimFiction account just about a year ago... which was quite possibly the laziest form of plagiarism I have ever seen.
Well apparently "Empty Darkness" is so good that it's been plagiarized twice. I just received a message on DeviantArt about someone who noticed the first Chapter of Empty Darkness was posted to "WattPad", a thing I have never even heard of. It was posted by "RomaniaPopescu", but the thing is that it was posted almost a year ago... about the same time as the above noted FimFiction incident. This leads me to believe that the same person is responsible, and may have also thrown my story to other places I'm not aware of.
When it was posted to FimFiction, I was laughing. This was because the original, almost-full story was already on FimFiction and all I had to do was point and say "Hey! Dat ain't right" and it was gone. Plus, free advertising. This time, however, I'm a little more concerned. As I said, I have no idea what WattPad is. At a glance it seems to be something more "serious" than FimFiction, intending for its users to make real fiction that can be read at home or on the go by others. As such, the avenue I was led to in order to report this theft was the Copyright Section (DMCA).
This made me feel uncomfortable. I have no actual "copyright claim" to this, as this is a fanfiction. Furthermore, there was lots of legal text in this avenue and they were asking for my full address and phone number, none of which I was comfortable with giving them. I get the feeling that they are not going to entertain a request like this unless it actually violates real copyright, after which point the only option I will have left is to pick up the phone and yell at them directly.
This doesn't look fun, but hopefully it will all work out okay. However, as I said before, there may be other places where this story just got tossed around. If any of you see anything, please bring it to my attention as soon as possible. This was funny at first, but it isn't funny any more. Please do not attempt any takedown measures of your own (No mobs!), I will handle those myself.
Thank you everyone. You're awesome.
~GB
Edit: Takedown successful.
Correction: you definitely do, in fact, have perfectly legitimate copyright under just about any country's laws you could care to name, purely by virtue of having written something that was not, itself, a straight ripoff of somebody else's work. Fanfiction, sequel-to-a-dead-author's-work, original fiction ... doesn't matter. Copyrights exist even if they are not registered, too.
What you don't have is the exclusive rights to the characters, but that shouldn't be a particularly significant issue, since the story is quite original.
Push your claim as hard as you can make yourself: the law is on your side.
3227407 Thanks, dude. Of course, this had to happen on Friday and no companies work on the weekend.
Wattpad is shit, no need to be worried.
3228999 It LOOKS like shit. I was immediately unimpressed.