Q –
Angela,
I googled help on someone stealing my personal experience and character name and your article came up about writers stealing from other writers. An elder lady writer has been stalking me for 7+ years every single day. She has copied my blog posts and used some of my blog post ideas as her own. She didn’t even bother to change the name of the character of my dead dog. She took a personal experience I went through and is trying to take credit for my life practically.
On her Twitter she would constantly spam pictures of dogs that look similar to my dead dog so this isn’t a thing of coincidence in story plot ideas. She deliberately stole my personal experience and rubbed it in my face knowing that she wouldn’t get into trouble for it.
She’s not going to get into any legal trouble because I have no energy to sue her for writing my personal experiences into her story.
Could someone please give me some advice on how to deal with this? She literally stole my life and is trying to write about it as her own.
A –
I recommend:
1. Copyrighting all the posts in your blog. Put them in all one document to save money.
2. Copyrighting your photos (you can also do those in bulk).
3. Wait until she steals your material again.
4. Send her an invoice for copyright infringement. Charge her $750 for each occurrence.
5. Pursue legal action if she doesn’t pay.
At the very least, it might make her stop her illegal activities.
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SUBMITTED BY EMAIL TO WRITERSWEEKLY:
Hi Angela,
This is in response to the Ask the Expert question about the woman stealing the blog posts and photos. Rather than put together a bundle of posts and photos and copyright them, she could consider copyrighting the blog as a serial publication through the copyright office. Knowing at some point I’d probably want to use my posts as part of a book (and not wanting to worry about them being stolen) I did this in 2011 when I began my blog. That step made my blog the same as any other online publication. Each day is a new issue of the publication and covered under the ISSN copyright just like each issue of a paper magazine is. You have to put the ISSN on the header at the top of the blog so everyone knows it’s copyrighted. Although I don’t need to, every six months I do a blog post about the ISSN in the header and why it’s there. You do have to get a new ISSN if you ever change the name of the blog.
Just thought this information might be worth passing on.
– Fiona