I'm sympathetic to her because she doesn't deserve the insanity that is the Internet-wide hit squad, but she sure isn't making it any better for herself. She doesn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of copyright in the slightest. She didn't "notice it was copy written"? Everything is copyright. There's no noticing involved. If you didn't write it, you can't use it without permission.
I would like to be a world famous writer. I was thinking of taking one of my books and just typing it, and then I would have written it instead of Nabokov. That's cool, right?
@2 - it also makes me doubt that any editing she has done to anybody's work has improved it. I get that some people are just not good spellers - but to completely misunderstand a word in your own trade after several decades? beyond pathetic.
The overall tone of this letter is downright sad. I'm guessing she'll have a lot fewer 12-14 hour days pretty soon.
I just read her statement, and I agree with Anthony - she doesn't deserve the full-on internet hit squad, and if her advertisers were getting a ton of negative attention as well that just sucks, but the statement is so full of excuses and poor-me and sticking the blame on the person whose work she took (plus she still seems to think she did Monica a favor) that it's really hard to feel bad for her.
@7- this is the thing I find most bizarre. How can someone who edits a magazine have such a vague grasp of copyright law? If she ran a personal blog with cooking stuff on it, I could understand not understanding. But it's a real magazine we're discussing. Bizarre.
According to Wikipedia, this publication has been around since 1997, which brings about the question of whether this is the first instance of plagiarism, or simply the first time they got caught? I suspect the latter, and if that's the case, this magazine should have died long ago. Better late than never, I suppose. For a writer/editor to have such a tenuous grasp of copyright is unacceptable. If you didn't create it, then it's not yours for the taking simply because it's on the internet (that goes for all you music/movie pirates out there too).
@14 - I think there's quite a disparity between my drunkenly torrenting Gary Numan's "Cars" so I can rock before passing out and Griggs' use of someone else's work to attempt to turn a profit.
@14, if you look around, you'll find DOZENS of violations, where she copied not just blog posts but articles and photographs from NPR, Disney, Martha Stewart, Paula Deen, and many others. You can compare the copy head to head with the original. It looks like virtually the entire magazine was copied from other sites without permission.
She claims to have been in publishing for 30 years.
@17 Well, you're right, not according to the law there isn't. But profiting off someone else's work is morally several shades away from the odd home download here and there.
"To one writer in particular, Monica Gaudio, I wish you had given me a chance."
boo hoo
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that said, its not just pirating some reproduceable material, but it's doing it for commercial ends. if you get caught and still try to get out of it, well it's just embarrassing for everyone.
Yeah, there's no slippery slope here. Stealing is stealing. Try telling Wal-Mart that it's OK to steal one of their TVs because you were only going to use it yourself and not sell it.
@25 - I'm not saying stealing a tv from Walmart for personal use is okay, but it's not as bad as if, say, you had a business selling electronics, and all your inventory was stolen from Walmart.
It's just the excuses they use to justify their stealing that differ.
The overall tone of this letter is downright sad. I'm guessing she'll have a lot fewer 12-14 hour days pretty soon.
She should have just waived her fist in impotent rage & yelled, "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddlesome kids!!!"
I miss Gourmet.
She claims to have been in publishing for 30 years.
boo hoo
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that said, its not just pirating some reproduceable material, but it's doing it for commercial ends. if you get caught and still try to get out of it, well it's just embarrassing for everyone.
Congratulations on doing the same sort of rationalizing as the subject of this article.