Paying to Plagiarize?

The idea of an online vanity press is a bit foreign to me. If I want to post my works online without the fear of rejection, I would just go to a site like allpoetry.com or any of the numerous blogging sites and create my own page, in my own style.

However, that’s exactly what 57storylane.com (link down) offers. A chance for anyone, who is willing to pay the $5 “administration fee” to have their work published on their site.

The service seems like a bad enough of an idea, especially considering the large volume of ads displayed on the site, but it’s even worse considering that someone, using the name “Jessica” took advantage of it to plagiarize two of my poems.

I can’t imagine actually paying someone for this service, much less paying them to post someone else’s work. I don’t know what they were hoping to gain from this, but I can’t imagine that it would be anything not available from other, cheaper sites.

Still, I’ve filed a DMCA notice with the host of the site and will watch this one as it develops. It’s just a strange tale that’s left me scratching my head and reminding me exactly how odd this war can be at times.

However, I guess it makes sense that those dumb enough to plagiarize would be easily taken in by a sham like this.

Update: The entire domain was site was pulled down, presumedly because of the DMCA notice. While this is extreme overkill in my book (removing an entire domain due to two bad pages), I’m force to assume that their host doesn’t have a means to disable access to pages without simply cutting the entire account. That’s very worrisome to me, especially since I hate using DMCA notices enough as it is.

[tags]Plagiarism, Vanity Press, Poetry, Literature, Writing[/tags]