Is there ever any recourse when your board gets ripped off?

[Anonymous 234]

Once upon a time, my board had a giant bullshit explosion and disgruntled members left to create their own board. Which was a complete ripoff. 

 

We let it slide then. We didn't think we had enough evidence to nail them.

 

They wholesale took a family ad from my board that someone else created and had to be badgered to put credit on it, since it's pretty my verbatim from the ad on my board.  When they did add the credit they made sure to display it in an inconspicuous way.  

 

I'm 99% sure they ripped one of our gdocs. (Unfortunately Google doesn't tell you when someone's saved a copy of your document). 

 

Now they've copied one of our events almost word-for-word. This was after we let some of the ones we banned come back.

 

I'm furious because we let them come back in good faith and they're still doing it.

 

Is there anything we can do? It's been two years and I've been quietly gathering evidence but I'm afraid that it's been too much time and that my evidence isn't good enough.

Anonymous poster hash: 00fd3...a2d

[Morrigan 1,826]

We actually have a guide about this:

 

Overall its a shitty situation and sucks pretty badly. The article itself sums it up a lot more neatly than I can in a reply but it really depends on what you can prove (no matter how old it is as long as you have proof that yours is older) and what they actually copied. There is some recourse but sometimes it's difficult to happen.

[PixieMegs 107]

I have had this happen. On multiple occasions. Every time I have had content taken word for word from my site and when I confronted them about it, they began posting everywhere they could that I was a liar even before I had publicly spoken out. However, I had taken screen shots of every and set them up for comparison. 

 

I would go by the article posted above by @Morrigan. It's the more secure method of doing things. When this happened to me, I did not know I could escalate it in that way and essentially took it upon myself to prove my content was the original. In the end, the sites with the stolen content died. I got called a bully, but I didn't care. Don't steal my shit and I won't be an asshole. If I had known how to properly handle it, I would have done it that way first. 

[Morrigan 1,826]

We take plagiarism really seriously here on the Initiative but we need a without a doubt burden of proof. Too often members of "similar genres" or "Similar fandoms" have come to us and told us to straight take sites out of our listing. While we are okay with that we don't do "This looks similar to this... this looks similar to this" it has to be a direct copy pasta.

 

One that comes to mind was a fandom based one. It was like Supernatural or Once Upon a Time or GoT or something like that. Something where they had a LOT of very similar photographs throughout the years and one site used one set and the "copycat" site used a different but extremely similar set for their "approval" messages. Similar, yes, copies, no. Other things provided to me as proof were "templates" which okay maybe but they were introduction templates (and BBCode). If someone snagged the questions I posted here on the Initiative for their own site I'd be like "good on you", however for this one it wasn't the "template" the accuser complained about. It was the content they wrote as their introduction that they found as plagiarism.

 

That one perked a brow because you technically can't plagiarize your own words....

 

All in all it ended up being a witch hunt due to bad  break ups so burden of proof is really important. Accuser didn't like that I let the accused stay but they didn't provide enough evidence to really prove they were copied so much as they were in the same fandom and so had similar information.

[Anonymous 234]

I'm definitely keeping this guide in mind.

 

There is a lot of good advice here, so I don't think I have anything that might help. But I hope you are able to gather what you need.

 

There have been plenty of situations where I've been, where pissed off members (often ones who break rules, funny) storm off and make their own site. In one situation, not only was the site a ripoff, but they outright mocked us. I also had an experience where someone took an rp idea I had and ran it with someone else. Right in front of me. Before they made their own site and, you guessed it, took that idea there as well. 

 

Sometimes it was former mods who were pissed off at one thing or another, other times it was just trouble makers thinking they were hot shit and/or not really realizing what it took to run a board. 

 

Some of the sites, the ones I remember anyway, all died as far as I can tell.

 

But yeah, it's infuriating. It sucks. It feels like you can't really do much as these people take from and then shit on you. I hope they get what's coming to them.

Anonymous poster hash: 1c455...739

[StormWolfe 557]

They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

 

As a recent victim of wholesale site plagiarism, I sympathize with you one-hundred percent. In my case, the thief actually advertised their site on one of the same RPG ad sites that I use. In fact, they found my site ad there. The only thing they changed in the ad was the name of the main company the characters all worked for. Everything else - premise, other characters, location, etc., were all identical. 

 

I was furious at first...then amused. 

 

There is very little recourse...sadly...  When the thief runs their ad, I retaliate by running my own ad emphasizing it as the original with dates for when it started, etc. It tends to stop thief from advertising for long periods of time and makes me happy.

 

Last go around, I just shrugged and said, "Bless their hearts, they loved us so much that after they quit, they created their own site based entirely on ours."

 

You can go all nuts, rage-stalking crazy or sigh, shrug and move on. I think the second option worked best for me. That and the satisfaction of knowing their site failed (never got a single member) and mine is going strong.

 

@VirusZero had some excellent advice in their guide.

 

Good luck with whatever you choose to do!

[CK23 2]

If I see my material on other sites without credit, I'll often shoot a message to the player and site admin but I've had 50/50 chance with that.

[Renya 55]

The closest I've personally had to this was seeing my own work - which I had carefully written out and researched - on another site, cited as belonging to that site without any mention of myself. I approached the admin and it was addressed with a credit to my name, this was just lore information for species and cultural details etc.

 

The most recent experienced involved the skin we had purchased for our site being ripped (badly) from the site along with some specific coding I had put together for the Guidebook section (this actually prompted me to redo the coding from the rather basic stuff that I'd initially patched together) we suspected the cause and doubtless their own justification and the culprit involved had been a member. I informed one of the members whose character;  from face claim, to name to concept had been taken without their knowledge - that was handled fairly smoothly. 

 

When it came to the skin, I informed our skinner as it seemed to be the right thing to do as they  (the culprit) were claiming the whole of the work as their own. We did try and tell the site admin (or one of them) about what the culprit had done and pointing out about the code but all that resulted in them doing was attempting to suggest they'd been *inspired by* the skinner's free skin that they had posted up ---> our skinner took it upon themselves to enter their Discord and post several remarks about the theft of her work as well as reporting them directly to jcink, to put it simply they were not amused at someone attempting to claim their work as their own. 

 

In the end, we didn't need to do anything to the site with respect to what they'd done, as like so many others, they didn't last and vanished soon after from their domain but not before turning themselves offline in the wake of the skinner making it clear that they wouldn't stand for their work being claimed and remain silent. 

 

There was some satisfaction in that. Mostly for the skinner and all their hard work. 

[Guest Moxxi]

I've had this happen once. I didn't really think it was worth doing anything about, but I was pretty mad about it at first. Once the anger wore off, I was really quite amused that those people couldn't come up with anything on their own. I decided to look at it is my ideas were so good, they couldn't think of a single thing to beat it. 

 

But, in the end, it sucks. It's disappointing and they get to do things the easy way. In the end, they barely lasted a year. I guess that was their karma. 

[Prophetess 137]

I've had it happen where something I wrote was used without credit or ripped off from what I was doing. I'd get mad yes and in the past I made a fuss. Over time though I came to realize that eventually it wasn't worth it. The site would close or the other thing happened. Just because they copied it, they couldn't keep it going because it would be different from what I had in my head. I stopped worrying over it after that. To me, it wasn't worth the fuss to chase everything down and start fighting over it. I kept coming back to while it was my idea and writing, they weren't me and can't make what I have into their own especially with other/different people involved. I don't sweat it anymore. To me it's disrespectful of them and that says something about them. What does say something about me is how I choose to respond to it.

[Dominic Sherwood 1]

3 times actually in the last two years and all done by the same person. there is no way to stop her as the server we rp in, doesn't care about this type of things.

 

Its infuriating, to say the least