I went to bed more pissed off last night then I have in a very long time. And I rarely, if ever cuss online, (see previous pissed off statement) so now it’s official, I’m mad.

Why? The big P. Lame people plagiarizing my work. Last night I went searching for a gov source about baby food textures. During that search, I completely by accident stumbled onto an eHow article that was mine. But not mine, because I’ve never personally written a word for eHow. No, my eHow name is ChristyQ. Lame old miss Q had taken a piece I did for online magazine and turned it into her own. How very nice.

Usually I don’t get so angry. I mean people scrap stuff all the time from my blogs. I send C&Ds, I email, I take care of it. It’s part of the game when you write. This week though… I have five major deadline, two interviews, ten architects to round up for a piece, and my regular blogging work. Busy week. I don’t have time to be thrown. I don’t have time for total idiots.

Luckily in this case, the online magazine I write for took care of it in under one hour. That was bliss, much love to them, and I should have felt better, but honestly, I’ve been obsessing all day. Obsessing. Yes, people stealing content is part of the writing game, but why should it be? I guess I was thinking last night that no matter what we do, no matter how we try to protect our writing, our blogs, our articles; someone is willing to cut in and claim it.

To add to that, while stolen content makes it easy to shut down a blog, there’s nothing to stop that same thief from starting up a new blog with stolen content. Plus, while places like eHow seem to take plagiarism seriously (my article was deleted from their site), they allow the writer to stay on and keep their profile up, so they obviously don’t take it as seriously as me, who feels a better plan would be to ban the alleged writer (using that term loosely) for life.

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