“If it’s not broke don’t fix it” was the cry of many of my online writing peers this week.
“Inkpop!” the online social writing blog established by Harper Collins, this week announced its collaboration with a similar site “Figment.com“. The publishing company had established the blogging site “Inkpop!” and were successful in their aims to garner new talent from the world wide web users, as mentioned in a previous post.
However, this lead to controversy among writers who were worried about the copyright of their works. It appears that Figment, allows users to copy the text of the stories that are available on the site. This revelation lead to a number of users removing their stories from the site. This highlights the level of awareness that one has to have about them when they go about publishing anything on the web. It also says something about the level of trust that we have in our peers. The movie piracy advert springs to mind – You wouldn’t steal a purse”, “You wouldn’t steal a car” why should you steal intellectual property.
The writers that publish on these sites, do so the gain confidence, to explore a hidden talent and to get feedback. Stealing or copying, as the case may be, means that you are fooling no one but yourself. And in the end there is no way that you could recreate something that someone else put the whole of their heart into.
As a user of a number of online social media writing websites – Wattpad and Booksie to name a few, I was rather impressed with the layout of the Figment.com website, easily accessible, maneuverable and has an up to date interface. As of yet I do not have any of my own works on Inkpop! therefore I have not chosen to move over to Figment, and will not be posting anything on the site until this copying issue is resolved. We are all using these sights for the same reason – we enjoy reading, writing or both! Do not be the person that discourages good writers from sharing their work with the world.
I would also call on others that use these sites to use good moral judgement when they are reading the stories, if you would not like it to happen to you do not to this to others.
emmastextualityblog 