

Ask HN: Has your work ever been plagiarized? - minouye

I recently had an experience where one of my web projects was copied - not an exact copy but clearly "inspired" by me. My initial reaction was to find some way to call the developer out and/or send an angry email, but in the end I've decided to ignore it and carry on.  Wondering if anyone here had similar experiences and how they dealt with them.  Keep in mind this isn't a huge project, but I've put enough time into it that being ripped-off is painful. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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nfnaaron
Not my work, but I posted something on a dial up ISP's forum years ago, and a
reader there posted it to alt.humor.best-of-usenet. I did a search a few years
later, and found it word for word posted on some advocacy site in Washington
DC, attributed to a woman who was not me.

I emailed the group, made my case with proof, and said I'd be flattered if
they kept it up with proper attribution. I don't recall hearing back, but they
took it down pretty quick. I imagine the "author" was a little embarrassed.

I just searched best-of-usenet, but now it's Google, you know, so I wasn't
surprised not to find it. I did find it out on the wider web, so, for
historical accuracy, it survives here:

[http://www.mail-archive.com/law-
issues@mylist.net/msg00390.h...](http://www.mail-archive.com/law-
issues@mylist.net/msg00390.html)

(scroll down to You Always Remember Your First)

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ww520
Yes, I once released a P2P product developed solely by me into GPL license.
Shortly after that I noticed another guy started another project copying
exactly all the source files, and he put a copyright with his name in every
single file even when there's no change in the file. Now I was ok if he wanted
to fork the project but damn it don't claim credit for work you didn't do. I
contacted him to ask him to remove his copyright and he said he's forking the
project and there's nothing I can do. I contacted Free Software Foundation and
they said there's nothing I can do. That's the way GPL works. I swore then I
would never release another GPL project again.

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minouye
Has the derivative project progressed at all? I'm assuming it was copyrighted
for the purpose of making money off of your work. Not that it is much
consolation, but I would imagine that if it didn't gain much traction, the
incident would be somewhat satisfying. They stole but were not able to attract
users. That's what I'm hoping for in my situation.

~~~
ww520
No, the forked off project gained no traction. I suspected it was a developer
wanting to put some cred under his belt. By putting his name into an open
source project, he can claim credit without doing any work. And his resume
would look good. He could say, I founded this P2P project (forked) and blah
blah blah. People won't know the difference.

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kbrower
Yes. I made <http://www.filleritem.com> about 6 years ago. Copied by many
people including Slickdeals.net. Not sure if these people were inspired by my
website or simply came up with the idea independently. If anything, it forces
you to keep your project working properly.

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minouye
That's a great example (and quite a cool tool) - did you decide to continue
building it out or did you lose steam after you found the copies?

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kbrower
I have iterated on the idea a few times. Mostly I have to make sure that I am
keeping up with the new versions of amazon's api(they discontinue old versions
every once in awhile) Amazon doesn't have a way(although they have gotten much
better) to make the relevant queries so you have to be a little creative to
get the tool to work accurately.

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jabrams
haha no never

