My friend Gina wrote an hysterical post about fainting goats on Monday. You should read it. You’ll find it at her site here.

Unfortunately, you can also find it here, on the MySpace page of this loser. Yep, Lauren Cormier, a 30-year-old who lives in Palm Harbor, Florida, apparently liked Gina’s post so much that she copied it, changed the names and posted it at her MySpace site as her own.

Most of us who have blogged for a while have had stuff taken. Usually, the thefts show up on robot sites that no one really pays attention to, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to track down the responsible party because he or she is on the other side of the planet.

What you don’t see very often is brazen theft like this. It’s absolute bullshit, of course, and if Lauren did something like this while she was in school, she would have risked being expelled. But then, I have to wonder whether Lauren attended college; any reasonably intellegent person has to know that outright theft of content is extremely difficult to get away with these days.

But — going on the assumption that Lauren isn’t aware of this — or just doesn’t care — I’d like to take a quick crack at changing her mind. I’ve already sent Lauren a message about the post; you can do the same by visiting her MySpace homepage and clicking “Send Message” link on the top right.

And if you have an extra few minutes, you could also report Lauren’s violation of the MySpace terms of service. You have the links you need above; email those to copyrightagent (at) myspace (dot) com. I’m sure they’d be happy to hear from you.

In some cases, there is little we can do when we get ripped off; in this case, we can definitely do something about it. I did, and I hope you do the same.

UPDATE: Looks like we got Lauren’s attention. She took the post down around 12:15 p.m. One more thing: Be sure to check out The Purple Pinkie’s special award for Lauren — she has to be so proud.

UPDATE No. 2: Lauren’s MySpace account is gone, deleted either by her or by MySpace.

10 Comments

  1. OMG – I have the best friends in the world! Anyone who thinks bloggy friends aren’t for real is truly missing out.

    Like

  5. Gina: Apparently what we did worked. She took the post down about 25 minutes after I did this.

    Karen/BB/AAA: Thanks for your help. It was great to see results so quickly.

    Like

  6. Done and done. As someone who spent the majority of her adult life warning and teaching about plagiarism, then catching and rendering the harshest punishment possible for those that did, and who had her very own Masters Thesis stolen and published by a committee chair…. Yeah… We can rally the troops…

    Also, I find this little bit from her original post ironically precient:

    “Here’s the plan (but lets keep it to ourselves because I don’t want anyone stealing my idea)”

    Like

  8. I was amused just yesterday to see that after the Tavern Trove website plagiarized my updates to Wikipedia’s page about the Duquesne Brewing Company, embellished a little, then inserted themselves as a reference, they got smacked down by administrators. It’s not that the admins were that clued in; it turns out mass insertion of self-promotional links gets their attention.

    Must just be a special time to try to take credit for other peoples’ work.

    Like

  10. Looks like her entire account is down now. “Invalid Friend ID. This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.”

    Like

Comments are closed.