Scenario: a person on ff.net has plagiarized my Harry Potter fic Definitions of Romance, doing a basic cut-and-paste to change character names and a few superficial details like the honeymoon location so as to fit it into a different fandom. The rest is based scene for scene, and often line for line, on my own fic, just lightly paraphrased so as not to be quoting word for word.
Question: do I care enough to do anything about this, and if so, to do anything more than leave a firm but polite comment saying that they need to either make their story more clearly differentiated from mine or else take it down?
...
I don't know, you know? The plagiarized version was posted in June of 2017 and the person responsible hasn't posted anything else on that site since then. They also don't seem to have cross-posted the fic anywhere else.
And a lot of people seem to have enjoyed the plagiarized version -- it's on several favorites lists and such -- so. Eh. I really don't want to encourage this kind of behavior, but it seems mean to abruptly make something that's given people pleasure just vanish off the face of the internet.
Mostly I'm just tired.
Anyone have thoughts to share?
Question: do I care enough to do anything about this, and if so, to do anything more than leave a firm but polite comment saying that they need to either make their story more clearly differentiated from mine or else take it down?
...
I don't know, you know? The plagiarized version was posted in June of 2017 and the person responsible hasn't posted anything else on that site since then. They also don't seem to have cross-posted the fic anywhere else.
And a lot of people seem to have enjoyed the plagiarized version -- it's on several favorites lists and such -- so. Eh. I really don't want to encourage this kind of behavior, but it seems mean to abruptly make something that's given people pleasure just vanish off the face of the internet.
Mostly I'm just tired.
Anyone have thoughts to share?