Woezines BBS News - Plagurism?

To Borrow, or Steal?

September 7, 2000

I was reading the new Woezine ezine issue #11 the other night, and noticed that much of their BBS Scene News section had been lifted from my site. My first thought to this was "hmm, someone could have asked me first, but oh well... No big deal.".

As I got to the bottom of the article, I noticed it listed the author of their BBS News as "The Crew". That seemed kinda funny, so I desided to go back to the main menu of their Ezine, and took a look at the "Credits" section.

article contributions -
  liquid       [dore]
  iph          [independent]
  aeternam     [n/a]
  klumzee      [purg]
  comatose     [iniquity  coder]
  black jack   [mimic]
  revolution   [mimic]

Now I started getting a little irritated. It's one thing to borrow my exact words without asking (Had someone asked, I definatly would have agreed), but to not list the BBS Archives or myself as a contributor was beginning to smell a lot like outright plagiarism.

If this work has been an ascii colly or somthin' like that, I'm sure people in the scene would have called it Ripping.

So who Ripped my work? I'm not going to start pointing fingers without proof, but someone definatly did. Much of it was taken word for word from my site.

I have a lot of respect for the ascii scene, or whats left of it. I've known many of the guys in the ascii/ansi scene for quite a while. pcmicro.com was affliated with ACiD Productions many years back, and was an ftp distro site for them long before cdrom.com came along.

I'm surprised that pouge_ (the editor of woezine) would allow it to happen, but perhaps he was unaware of it.

Btw pouge, in case you read this, I noticed that your web site at http://www.thuglife.org/woezine/ still mentions the 2 hard drive crashes I had at pcmicro just 3 weeks apart. Well it's been nearly 2 years now since then... I think its becoming just a bit dated. :)