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© 2004-2008 Linda Escaip
"I may be grumpy but I like you."
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The Suns and Moons of the Grumpiest Girl in the Room.
I wish integrity wasn't scarce.
A Note For Melina, The Incessant Plagiarist From Palmdale 24-May-2007
A while back I found myself on My Space. I don't mean that I set out on some journey of self-exploration and found the true meaning of all things me by setting up my own account on that ever-popular site. It would be nifty if that were true, because who doesn't want to have to work that little to find out who they are? No, what I mean is that I found someone pretending to be me on their My Space profile, blog, etc. Imagine my surprise at finding another Grumpiest Girl in the Room. I wondered, were we in the same room? Were we wearing the same floral sundress? Did she look better in it than I do?
The darling copyright infringer's name is Melina, and she apparently thinks I'm stupid. That's a sad assumption, tiny wrestler. When I first discovered her, I found several blog entries on her My Space that had been pilfered from my site. Photographs too. You can imagine my lack of utter delight. I write something meaningful about someone I love who has died and I find it vomited back in my face on some girl's Myspace profile. I write something about someone who has recently hurt me and there it is as one of her blog entries. It's nothing short of disturbing. I commented on a few of the blog entries, letting her know she was infringing on my copyright-protected work, and she made her profile private within a few hours.
I have screenshots and cached pages of everything I found that day, as well as stuff I found later that she had looted from my site. She wasn't just plagiarizing my writing on her own My Space pages; she collected Loo notes and various other writings of mine and put them in her friends' My Space comments. I wonder how many of my sentences get stuffed into emails she sends. I wonder a lot of things at this point.
I was so proud of Melina the day that she made her profile public again and had removed all of my content. I was truly grateful and wished her well from afar. I tried to contact her to thank her but my note wouldn't go through Myspace's system. In spite of my relief, there is no denying that it is a creepy feeling to find someone stealing your thoughts and feelings, and it didn't shake off easily. I'm still wearing the creepiness, which is why I continue to check her My Space. It has been set to private again. That made me revisit my uneasiness. I was able to figure out her IP address from my stats and she is definitely still visiting, but I haven't been successful at training my site to bite her on the ass every time she absconds with a piece of my life experience.
Melina, that is exactly what you're taking from me—a part of my experience of this world and my life that has been put into words by me. These are not your experiences. Those sentences you steal are made of my unique voice, not yours. I had a funny feeling today so I did a little checking and found a comment you left on May 22, 2007 on your friend's profile:
I wrote that in the Loo on January 22, 2005. Not the greatest paragraph I've ever written, but it's honest and it reflects what I felt at that time in my life.
Why are you still taking from me, Melina? Did you not understand what I told you about copyright infringement? I wasn't kidding when I told you it's illegal. Where did you get the impression that you could take credit for what I create? Do you steal when you go shopping? Do you have a difficult time differentiating between what belongs to you and what doesn't? Is your personality so underdeveloped that you feel you have to masquerade as someone else? Do you have any desire to find your own voice? It's a fucking beautiful thing, you know, finding your own voice. Figure out what you want to say and say it your own way. The whole purpose of a blog is to express your own thoughts and feelings. You're missing the point. Explore this big world and your own head and heart and you'll figure it out.
Please leave my words and photographs where they belong—on my website. I can promise you they are not yours to take.
Linda Escaip
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