Dear Whyvillians, I am sorry to complain, but we have a serious issue here.
This is 22kool4u, reporting on the Adobe Photo Contest. It's not right to only
focus on complaining, but this time talking about the problem is a must.
It appears that some people (I'm not naming any names) take photos of pets off of
sites such as FunnyJunk and eBaume's World, then change the name and submit it
to
Whyville.
This is totally wrong.
When you enter the contest, there is a little box you check off that says
something like "By checking this box, you are ensuring that this picture is yours
and was not taken by anybody else."
I've seen SO many... well... obviously fake pictures that are just about impossible to
have been
taken in real life. I've seen SO many pictures that I recognize from different
sites taken by other photographers.
This is plagiarism.
Have you heard of it? It is when you steal credit for something someone else
has done and call it your own. If you didn't take the pictures, you have no
right to enter it in the contest! They have a copyright, they have a right to
own what they made and be known for it!
Some companies take this kind of stealing very seriously. For example, if you had
copied a CD or a videocassette, you could be fined a lot of money or even
sent to jail! You don't want that to happen, do you?
Anyway, for those of you who have taken pictures from other sites and people
before, don't
worry about it now. Just don't do it in the future. If you didn't know about
this, then no one can blame you. However, if you purposely did this, shame
shame shame on you!!! But now, you can learn, and you can be a good person from
now on.
Everybody else, go check how many pictures look so fake and see how many you might
recognize from other sites. If you can find the original photo, email the link
to city-management@whyville.net
and they'll take care of it.
Plagiarism sucks. Don't be a part of it.
This is 22kool4u, letting off a little steam...
Editor's Note: If you lie to the Times and tell us that an
article, story or poem created by someone else is really yours, you will never
be published in the Times again. That's creative theft, and there's few crimes
more offensive to a writer than that. The real question is, why would people
want to do that? For the Adobe Contest, it makes some sense -- some people don't
mind sacrificing their good word and stealing other people's ideas in order to
get *stuff*. They'll learn and grow up from that someday. In the Times, though,
there's no money or prizes. Why do I still get poems by Shel Silverstein that
some folks want to claim is theirs? Even if it's once in a blue moon, it's still
a mystery, and I'm honestly curious. Other than the nasty thoughts we might
think about such folks, what do you think motivates them?
On a similar
tangent, why is it important to you to only get credit for your own work? Or do
you not mind getting credit for the bad? ;-)
Talk amongst
yourselves....
