At the time of this writing, I've had three main copycat incidents. Two were minor and one was major. I'll write about the minor ones first.

My Eragon Essay was kidnapped and submitted to a network of sites that SELLS "book reports." Of course, they have a big disclaimer that you're not supposed to turn in anything on the site as your own work; they're "for reference," they say. But then they also have an exorbitantly-priced service where you can hire someone to write a paper for you within a day or two days on "ANY SUBJECT, GUARANTEED!" but even those are supposed to be for reference. Yeah right.

I had a hard time even writing to them to tell them they were selling my frigging essay. Because there were no contact e-mail addresses, and the only way you could communicate with them was a form-sent response. And . . . you guessed it . . . to fill in the form you needed a user ID, and to get a user ID you had to become a member, which COST MONEY.

I was like, "I'll be damned if I pay a fee to go tell them they can't sell my writing!" But luckily ONE of the four networked sites had a submission form that didn't require membership, and when they contacted me in response they said they'd take it down immediately. I didn't have to offer any proof or argue about it at all. Which tells me this must happen to them all the time.

They claimed on the site that all their material is submitted by users who offer it claiming it's their own. And if that isn't a lie, someone pretended my essay was theirs and let these people sell it to kids who don't want to do their homework. I have to wonder how many times people turned in my essay before I caught them. . . .

The second idiot I had to put the smackdown on was probably just a kid. He claimed to be 18, but he typed and communicated on maybe a second grade level, so I don't know about that. I was looking at the stats on my online comic, seeing who all's linking to me, and I came across a URL I'd never seen linking to me before. Long story short, I found this was a page about some video game and the perpetrator had ganked my "how-to" instructions on alt code use, complete with the table I coded and a piece of my art. (He swiped the whole thing out at the CODE level, which means it was linking to my site for the graphics.)

I had an argument with him about taking it down, and he was apparently so thick he didn't even understand what I wanted him to do. I gave him several warnings, some of which were answered with garbled claims that it wasn't fair since he perceived someone else was "copying" me too. (That was a misunderstanding on his part. The girl he was talking about used alt codes on her page, but she didn't have pasted my instructions and table on how to use them. He claimed he had the right to keep my codes because if I was letting her use them then he could too, and that I was probably doing this because he's a BOY and she's a GIRL. Uh-huh.)

I followed his site host's procedures on reporting a violation of copyright, printed out the offending section of his page as well as the information on how to find my original document, and included the information about my registered copyright number and what I wanted done. I sent it to their registered copyright agent and waited. A little over a week later, his site disappeared and a "frozen for abuse" page was put up in its place. I win.

But the first and most serious case of copyright b.s. was Miss Elizabeth of Platform Boots, and here we have her story.

In a nutshell, a string of text from my Web page was "lifted" and used on this girl's page, without my permission. She liked my page enough to sign the guestbook (with a compliment!) and she left a link, but apparently she did more than just like the page . . . she wanted a piece of it for herself, and took a short paragraph verbatim and slapped it on her front page. There were a few other violations, like a few new pages that popped up which copied my list of links in the same order with the same descriptions, but the exact string of text was what I was most worried about.

I contacted her in a friendly way. I thanked her for the compliments, took a look around her page and made some comments, but I also told her I'd seen what she'd taken from me and requested its removal. She replied that she was keeping it and that I couldn't do anything about it because I didn't have a copyright (which is not true). Her actual response was as follows: "Sorry, hun, but I'm not removing the disclaimer from my site...you didn't copyright it and therefore it's free for anyone to take. Buh-bye!" I wrote her back, explaining how copyright works and why I did, indeed, own the rights to my work, but she was not responsive.

I discussed the problem with a few friends, some of whom contacted her (without being encouraged to by me, I might add) and were treated with . . . disrespect is the nice word for it. (If I quoted the e-mails and messages here, you'd be surprised at the range of insults, from rude sexual suggestions to accusations of homosexuality.) I know this sounds like I must've been fighting with like a twelve-year-old or something, but here I might mention that she was a couple years my senior and married; she was more than capable of behaving like a rational adult, or she SHOULD have been.

Her actions then began to become more vengeful: I guess in order to "punish" me for attempting to enforce my rights to my own material, she decided to try to publicly smear me. At first her slant was just making fun of me; she created a Web page about me full of libelous statements and sexual innuendo, and she signed her own guestbook multiple times trying to make it look like all these people were visiting her that also had heard of and hated me for having my head so far up my ass as to care about something like swiping crap from Web pages.

I contacted her again and made it very clear that I expected her to remove my material. She responded by changing her story, deciding that I had stolen the text from HER, and changed the page and all her guestbook entries to make it look like all along the issue was over me stealing from HER. She made this page about how I steal from people all the time and that if anyone else coming to the page had been stolen from by me they could join the "Anti-SKANKivy" club. (It even had its own "support" graphic that she made all by herself!) And of course all these imaginary people suddenly started joining it and talking about how I'd copied them too. Wow, what an amazing response for a dinky site on Geocities, huh? I'm still not sure if she thought that would fool me, but considering *I know I never copy anyone*, it's kind of hard to trick me into thinking all these people are actually against me . . . pathetic, really.

She also began misrepresenting my friends and me on her page and in her guestbook, saying we were "harassing" her and changing what they wrote in the book. (For instance, my friend Ronni had a sentence in a rather long guestbook entry that read as follows: "Why steal from her when you could easily come up with things just as clever? . . . Your mean words about her doesn't show you as being the person who is so 'witty' and creative, it shows you as small-minded and ignorant because you are judging someone you don't even know!" Elizabeth edited that response to say this: "So witty and clever!" And then she wrote Ronni and said "You lose! Have a nice day!")

My response: I couldn't just let her go on using my work without permission, but I treated her like she could be reasonable, trying to find an angle to get her to cut it out. I wrote her a couple letters, threatened to go over her head and report her, but nothing worked, and her responses kept getting more and more childish and mean. Her story definitely changed several times; first, she was admitting her theft but claiming she could take whatever she wanted; then it became a case of her claiming that she'd written the bit of text herself and that I'd stolen from HER; and THEN she re-worded my work slightly and claimed I'd gotten it from her and did that sort of thing habitually (while also lying that she'd never been to my site).

My action included reporting her to the appropriate places (I even wrote to the Registered Copyright Agent for Angelfire, shortly after which her page disappeared) and documenting the details on a Web page. She just put up her crap on a new server, one that didn't respond to copyright infringement reports, and kept adding stupid things to look like she had support, signing her own guestbook and mine, posting supposed updates on things I was doing that I wouldn't dream of, et cetera. I kept tabs on her partly because I wanted to make sure she wasn't stealing my stuff and partly because I just wanted to know what she was saying about me. (I hear some people crying "Oh God, you were obsessed with her!" at this point, but come on now . . . if someone was writing ANYTHING about you somewhere, good or bad, you'd want to see what it was, wouldn't you?)

Anyway, after this went on for far too long, she suddenly moved her site, removed all traces of me, and then on her new site pretended to be a totally innocent victim of privacy invasion (because of how detailed my site was), putting up a façade of being stalked for no reason. Rather odd, considering she never mentioned anywhere on her page WHY I had information about her or what my horribly offensive privacy invading site was ABOUT. She simply said that I released her personal information against her will, like she had no clue as to why I did (as if I was just some crazy person bent on destroying her without motive).

I suddenly began getting harassed with crazy fake guestbook entries from all her "friends" saying how horrible I was. (Wow, with all the times she'd moved her site around, how could any of them find her anymore?) The "friends" belittled me in e-mails and guestbook entries about my privacy invasion, and informed me that they'd reported me to my service provider. Shortly thereafter that part of my site was deleted for displaying too many details that could lead to her connection with the case--she didn't like that I posted the e-mails and that they included the e-mail HEADERS, and she was dumb enough to put her real first and last name in the header. That bit of my site was frozen (though luckily not much of my page resided on that free site) because my service provider had a policy against releasing personal information. She probably would have made something up and tried to report me anyway if that hadn't been there, but it was.

Linking the information to her against her will wasn't necessary, but I didn't do it to hurt her; I released the name and e-mail because they were part of the headers of the e-mails I was posting, and I provided a link to her site so people could read *her* side of the story. She didn't appreciate it, and I paid for it by having one of the little parts of my site eaten . . . and there, over and done. You'd think that'd be the end . . . not even close.

Before she'd changed her status to "victim," she'd displayed all my screennames that she could find (which she gathered by searching exhaustively through my site to see which names my files were stored on), and posted my friends' names and e-mails. But when she wanted to change her story, she of course had to remove that from her own page, and did so. She stated on her page that even linking to someone without their permission is a violation of privacy, I suppose to threaten me that if I linked to her she'd try to nail me again. I think that once you put something online it is published, and you don't need any sort of permission to share published work (as long as you're not claiming it as your own, making money off of it, or removing it from its intended place of display) . . . but the fact remains that she didn't want me to share it and after that I respected her wishes. I always did, even though she never once treated me with respect.

The whole episode affected me in several ways. I suppose I was angry, annoyed, pitying, relieved, happy . . . all for a lot of different reasons. I was angry because that girl had no right to steal from me what was mine, publicly smear me in return for my help, harass me, insult me and my friends, or play innocent when she was guilty and knew it full well. It made me mad that this happened to me at all, and that it continues to happen to some of my friends.

But then I suppose it moved down into the annoyance category. The annoyance was directed mostly at her but some at myself for even feeding the fire . . . I know that she was probably just bored or feeds on hurting other people and that it's likely I provided entertainment for her. But I suppose my annoyance AT her overrode that--the fact that another person was passing off my precious writing as her own even though she knew it was not hers, knowing how wrong it was, was just annoying. The fact that copyright laws are necessary is annoying--people like her make them necessary, because unscrupulous people will just do anything for their own benefit.

And the pity part--it's mostly for her. Because I know how much work and time we both put into this case . . . and I feel pity because she did it all just because she was mad I didn't let her get away with passing my stuff off as hers. In other words, no good reason. She spent precious hours and--well, brain cells--on concocting stories and ridiculous things--even graphics!--when she herself knew that she was *wrong*. She had to change the location of her Web site like six different times to try to shake me off her trail while I was still pursuing my intellectual property. I feel pity for the society that created someone who can find it in her heart to do things like this; I feel pity for those in her life because I've seen what she is capable of and I just wonder when that spiteful streak will ruin another relationship; I feel pity for HER because she cannot even swallow her pride and admit her faults. I feel pity because I know there is a woman who is capable of needlessly hurting another person for her own pleasure--I feel pity because she is stuck with being the kind of person who can't respect another person. I actually feel *sorry* for her, and all she can say about it is that I must therefore just be jealous of her. Even if I was jealous of the things she has (which I'm not), it wouldn't make me want to be her.

My crime was having the ability to write something she liked, and the unwillingness to let her get away with passing it off as hers. I was rewarded for my crime of being a good (yet proud) writer by being disrespected, harassed, and flamed. And then she had the nerve to say that I was doing something morally wrong because I (without malicious intent!) released her personal information, when her crimes included stealing my text, lying about it being hers, slander and libel, and general priggish nastiness, not to mention the fact that she was guilty of releasing personal information herself. Yes, pity is the right word for it . . . she lives in that weird world where stuff like that is just part of life, and I'm baffled by it.

Now for the relief: I'm just relieved that she finally stopped using me as inspiration while publicly defaming me. I'm relieved that somehow she came to the conclusion that my words were not worth the trouble they caused. I'm relieved that for whatever reason I am no longer the unwilling author of parts of her Web site. And lastly, the happiness . . . I'm just feeling happy about getting my feelings onto the page. I like writing earnestly and honestly about my feelings, and I like the idea that maybe, since there's nothing left about me to attack . . . perhaps she will finally find something positive to do.

Despite having been misrepresented on her Web page as "some obsessed girl who released her personal information," as if it was completely out of the blue, I tried my best not to fall into the trap of retaliation . . . there were many mean things I could have done all along that I just never did because I don't believe revenge helps anything. As I said, after she put up this misleading page about having her information released, I started receiving hateful guestbook entries and e-mails from a variety of people--at least, they claimed to be so, I believe they were from at the most two people and I believe I know who they are, and I'm not fooled by these laughable attempts to make me think all these random people came out of the blue to condemn me for being so horrid as to release personal information (of course, with no mention of "gee, what that girl did to you sure was rude too, huh?"--just shocked scolding about how I should respect the poor girl's privacy). If random people really were a) seeing my site that much and b) feeling strongly about the issue, I would have gotten hate mail before . . . it was up for like three months with the personal info on it, and I only started getting the hate mail the days after my copycat took MY personal information off of HER site so that she didn't look like a hypocrite. It didn't look like concerned parties that just happened to all see my site around the same time; conversely, it looked like an attempt to make me think I did something wrong. The girl whose personal information I released never e-mailed me and asked me to take it down (I would have)--she just reported me and took care of it that way (though I received guestbook entries from supposedly different people who said that they were the ones that reported me because they were appalled that I could do something so disgusting--later she admitted she reported me herself also, yet another inconsistency in the story).

As an aside, the supposedly different people who came out of the blue to criticize me sometimes happened to send their messages within the same half hour . . . while my copycat happened to be online too . . . coincidentally using the same sorts of words she'd used in the past and a predisposition for making fun of my being short and dissing my friends in really stupid ways, all with an amazing grasp of the history of the case for separate unrelated people and an unreal zest for standing up against my nonexistent harassment. The truth is, I didn't do anything to her--hadn't wanted to, even--since the day she gave me what I wanted. When I was "doing something" about it, it was all extremely civil.

At one point I was accused, in one of the many letters I received, of "having my friends" harass her, when I did no such thing, just as she claimed to not be "having" anyone harass me. My friends knew about the case because I talk to them, and they left guestbook messages or e-mailed or IMed her their opinions. Only one of them was inappropriate and it wasn't my fault. All were treated and billed as harassment.

I started getting three or four guestbook entries a day, and a couple of e-mails; once it was the *same exact text* put back in the guestbook after I deleted it the first time. Whoever was harassing me gave so many clues that it was the same person that I can't even name them all. Not to mention that I just don't believe that this many different people would suddenly be standing up and voicing complaints over this like this is World War Three and I'm the new Hitler. My page was just not being seen by that many people, at least not this part of it, and I definitely have parts of my site that you'd think would generate hate mail. I did not hurt anyone; I released information on my Web page--through my exhaustive documentation--that she did not want released, mostly because it incriminated her. As a side note, all of the personal information she got all cheesed at me for revealing was on her Web page anyway--she was not trying to hide it from the public. She was simply trying to hide that she ever copied from me.

I stopped writing back to the guestbook entries and e-mails once I decided there was no way these could be real people. She just wanted to hurt me and "get back" at me even though she started the whole thing. I'm still trying to remember if I squashed her as a fly in another life or something. This girl claimed to be a Wiccan (and had a nice witchy page full of other people's stolen graphics), and that strikes me as odd because one would think that someone like her would understand that hurting people for selfish purposes is not wise--Wiccans follow the Threefold Law. Perhaps I was her equivalent of a punching bag; maybe she didn't like the way her life was going so she amused herself by trying to bother me. The fact is that everything I was accused of (directly and indirectly), she was guilty of. Copyright infringement, misrepresentation, abuse, libel, being "vengeful and spiteful," and many other things--they all describe her actions that she projected onto me. And there I was, getting hate mail and goofy guestbook entries about an itemized "obsessive" site that was removed ages ago and couldn't even be viewed anymore at the time I was getting the messages.

She probably felt like I did my share of the punching in this "fight," but all of my action was defense, and I have documentation of every shred. I just don't see the need to display it anymore because it makes it look like I still have a fight with someone, instead of just being a recounting of a series of unpleasant events and my reactions. I don't want to fight or bicker or spend my time writing responses to people who aren't even listening to me. I just wanted her to realize there was no fight, and that the only thing I "fought" for was over; she was no longer using my writing illegally, and when she stopped doing so I stopped contacting her, ages ago.

And yet she didn't stop there, and slapped up a bunch of lies on her site, unable to leave it alone. She started going on about how the reason I stalked her so mercilessly was that I must be jealous of her, since her life is so great and she's prettier than me and has a car or something. ::guffaw:: Beauty is a matter of opinion, of course, I guess you'd have to judge for yourself on that one, but I fail to see how someone who still has no desire to have a driver's license would be jealous of someone's car, puh-leez. It seemed like she was trying to make me look petty for caring about this issue, yet she was the one going "haha, I'm married, tall, and have a cool car" when I don't even want any of those things. . . . Oh yes, please, I sure wish I was *tall* . . . ::eyeroll:: Why do people think being short must be so bad anyway? That's just silly. And please, I need some marriage proposals . . . I just don't get enough attention from guys that I don't want in the first place. ::snort:: It's just kind of twisted, the way she misrepresented me, and the way she obviously went through my site and read a *lot* about me trying to find things to make fun of. (She'd have to have gone to my pictures page to think she's better-looking, had to have read my stats to find out how tiny I am, et cetera . . . hmm, and I'm obsessed with HER now? She mentioned that I was not worth her time, but for someone so insignificant to her, she sure bothered to learn a lot about me, eh? Flattering, but a little sick.)

Eventually she took down her page that even mentioned me, claiming that she had been sick in the hospital for a while and that experience had taught her to pay attention to things that are worth her time. Which is funny because the whole tone of it was to make it out like I was the bad guy in the whole scenario but poor innocent Elizabeth has decided to take the high road and leave it behind. Well, considering the truth was YOU STARTED IT and YOU WERE DOING SOMETHING BOTH SHITTY AND ILLEGAL, I don't find it surprising at all that you want to leave your shame in the past. Good for you!

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