No, THIS is the truth....

If you blog long enough, sooner or later you'll probably run into one of those weird people who will say negative things about your blog for no clearly apparent reason. Well, someone was kind enough to tell me that I've ran into my first "dissatisfied visitor," and I have been accused, of all things, plagiarism.

The somewhat derogatory remark was from an anonymous comment from another blog alluding to yours truly for allegedly plagiarizing blog entries from other bloggers.

I normally don't regard nasty anonymous comments as worth replying to because you see, if a person is not really willing to take credit for an unsavory comment, that doesn't really speak well of that person's conviction regarding his or her beliefs, nor his or her own integrity.

But I guess it doesn't hurt to post my own side of the issue, and probably to get some things straight with the way I blog.

Plagiarism defined in simple terms is the act of copying someone else's work and then passing it off as one's own. What do I think of it? I abhor plagiarism. Do I do it myself? Absolutely not.

Somehow, someone has saw fit to accuse me of plagiarism, and the evidence presented was my fairly recent blog entry entitled Unaware of your angel which is identical to a post made by myepinoy which can be found here.

Truth be told, I did not write that story. It was emailed to me some time ago, a forwarded email which has no doubt been read and reread countless times. The title of the post in question is in fact the subject heading of that email. I'm sure you get the same sort of email in your inbox, whether it be inspiring short stories, jokes, slideshows, funny pictures, and probably the occassional porn pic or two. :-)

Every once in a while, I post these material on my blog whenever I chance upon something worth sharing, and Unaware of your angel was one of those posts. Unfortunately, by the time the story got emailed to me, the title was already different, and the author's name was no longer mentioned, so I wasn't able to cite the author.

To the best of my knowledge, the story itself belongs to the public domain, that is, it is not copyrighted by anyone. In simpler terms, no one owns it. In Latin, res nullius.

Is my posting of the story in question considered plagiarism? Well, firstly, I never claimed to be the author of that story. Secondly, the story in question is in the public domain.

In fact, lately I've been posting a lot of material I've been getting through email. That, and quite a lot of quiz results as well. :-) I've been somewhat busy, so I just don't have as much time for blogging as I would like. I don't think there's anything wrong about posting such material. Aside from sharing stories that I find interesting, it helps keep my blog updated. Besides, as far as I know, none of the material I use are copyrighted/owned by anyone. If they are, someone let me know, I would be more than willing to take the offending post down.

I actually have a disclaimer to that effect, if anyone actually bothers to scroll down to the bottom of my sidebar. The first paragraph states:

Some posted material are not original works and are merely collected from various sources such as email or the internet. Authorship of works of this type is not in any way claimed. Original authors are cited whenever known.

Pretty clear eh? And to stress the point, I always use italics whenever I post material that I didn't write myself, to differentiate it from material I actually wrote.

So that's it. I was always an advocate of responsible blogging, so I think it would be quite hypocritical if I actually resorted to plagiarism. That would just go against everything I stand for. Of course, if some of you have a negative opinion of me as a blogger, that is by all means your right, notwithstanding any explanation I make. I am pretty confident that no one can prove that I'm a plagiarist, because I know deep down in my heart that I am not and that I would never resort to deliberately stealing other peoples' works.

Nonetheless, I take that comment as a reminder that I should be more careful about posting material that I didn't write myself. And perhaps some of you people can also learn a lesson from this incident.

Plagiarism is absolutely and positively wrong, and it will be a cold day in hell before I do it myself. Enough said.