Fan-Fiction

From: <SonicKC_at_aol.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 21:41:12 -0400

I know this may be considered as off-topic, but I feel that this is an issue
which warrants a discussion about the rules here.
As many, if not all, of you know, I am currently in the process of writing a
fan-fic called Hearts of Steel. The story is about Mecha-Sonic being freed
from Robotnik and joining the Freedom Fighters (if you want the full preview,
just check my first post). Imagine how disappointed and upset I was to find
that someone had written a story using almost the same title and plot; I
announced Hearts of Steel about 2-3 weeks ago, and this story was added
between Monday afternoon and today. By now I'm sure that some of you are
jumping up and down to tell me that this could just be a coincidence, but I
find that hard to believe. I will not give the author or title, but I will
say that the title was similar enough that if you replaced one word with the
word "of", and switched the order around, you would get my title. The plot
was way too similar (almost exactly the same), and the fact that it was just
uploaded makes me very suspicious that this is a minor case of plagiarism
that we're dealing with here, which makes me rather upset and angry. This
makes me very reluctant to share my ideas again, since I always thought that
it was safe to give a short preview of your stories without worrying that
they will be copied. I thought we had a sort of code of honesty here! I am
writing this as a hope that the author will see this and feel at least a
little guilty for what they did and also to try and help prevent this sort of
thing from happening in the future. =(

P.S. to the author: You're welcome to use my ideas, but I wish that you had
let me know first! =(

Received on Wed Apr 24 1996 - 22:34:37 PDT