Hello everyone,

When I originally set out to write stories on , and eventually FictionPress, there weren't as many problems with plagiarism as there seems to be now. I also told myself that I would only post stories and not long author commentaries like this, but I think this may be important enough.

I take plagiarism very seriously. Partly because I value originality above a lot of things in a story, but also because I think it's important to value someone else's creative achievements. Some people are very good at what they do, and there are a lot of people who read that story that probably end up very upset and disappointed when authors find their stories plagiarized, and then remove them from the site.

This has happened to me on two or three stories that I have been very dedicated to reading for quite a while. It was frustrating because these authors tended to update quite frequently, and I was looking forward to reading their stories between classes. Sometimes I would have to get up really early to print off a paper, and I would spend the extra part in the morning reading stories before class. It was quite disappointing when these stories started to disappear from FictionPress.

Those who plagiarize anyone else's work, do not deserve to be on any online story writing site. As far as I'm concerned, they should have legal action taken against them. Whether it's a published work, or an online story, it's still plagiarism.

I'm not going to say too much more just because everyone probably knows all of this, I just thought it was important to take a stance on this issue. Any authors that have had their stories taken, please don't get discouraged! As I wrote on a review not too long ago, I will always keep my eye out while I'm reading stories. If I find one that I know is plagiarized, I promise to alert the plagiarized author so they know.

Does anyone else think that FictionPress should get rid of their copy/paste function? That would probably cut down on this problem a lot.

Thank you, and good luck to everyone in their writing and reading,

Lilith Rei