Sorry for the big post guys, but if anyone can help, it would be much appreciated.
My fanfiction ‘Hautley’s Bend’ was stolen, characters named and genders changed, and listed for sale on iTunes as an iBook in 2 parts under the title “Angels & Demons” by someone named Bella Madison.
In addition, the fanfiction ‘Smiling Out Of Fear’ by thepinupchemist ( @scarlettofletters ) has been stolen and posted on there as well, under the title “Sugar Lane” by Bella Madison.
Please if you can take a second to signal boost this, it would be much appreciated. It’s possible that other fanworks have been stolen and sold for profit on iTunes by this author, and there’s nothing worse than having your works stolen as an author or artist.
If anybody has any advice or can signal boost this, that would be awesome.
Appalling!
what the actual FUCK
Reblogging this again because, at a very quick glance, it seems clear that Bella Madison’s entire catalogue is plagiarised from a variety of other sourcecs.
The Goodreads blurb for their book White Lines, published in 2016, is identical to the blurb for a different book, Hooked, by Ashley Valentine (who also writes as Ashley Love), published in 2015; the same is also true of the sequels in each series. I checked to see if the two might be the same author, but the only direct point of connection I could find between Madison and Valentine/Love was, curiously, Love giving a 5-star review to White Lines on Goodreads:
By googling the blurbs of all Madison’s books, which they don’t appear to have altered at all from their original sources, here’s what I found:
– Madison’s Roommates has the exact same blurb as a One Direction fic called Not Happening by scottmcniceass
– Madison’s Just A Game has the exact same blurb as Ashley Love’s Game.
– Madison’s They Don’t Know About Us has the exact same blurb as Ashley Love’s Complicated, and coincidentally produces, when Googled, a string of dead links to other online publication sites where the same story has evidently been taken down. Also, this one is fucking weird because it’s literally a story about a romance with Harry Styles? Who exists? That is being passed off as something not RPF? Like. Without actually downloading Madison’s version to check the text, I can’t google anything other than the blurb, but I would lay money that a book with this premise began life as an RPF fic.
Either way, whoever Madison is, they appear to have multiple author accounts on multiple platforms (Scribd, Smashwords etc), so that not all their works are listed in the one place; it’s also clear that a lot of their works have already been taken down, even from Kindle, suggesting they’ve been caught out before. Even if they actually are a pseudonym of Ashley Love/Ashley Valentine instead of someone who’s just stolen that author’s work repeatedly, it’s clear they have no compunction about taking the works of ficwriters, too.
THIS IS REALLY FUCKING SHITTY AND UNACCEPTABLE OH MY GOD, DO NOT FUCKING PLAGIARISE
Not only is this shitty, it is in fact theft-of-work and IP lawyers would be entirely justified in getting involved.
(since no copyright, no damages, but there could be a whole lot of public, professional fall-out for the thief)
This happens a lot, and it’s why I had to take all the free short stories off my web site. A guy was taking them and making them into ebooks, and selling them on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks etc, with himself listed as “editor.” He had taken books posted free online by other authors and done the same. I’m not surprised it happens to fanfic, too. I am surprised that the entire A03 hasn’t already been copied into ebooks by pirates and sold on various retailers. I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.
Mooncustafer 