
I may or may not have been the victim of an April fools joke played by the editors of EGM. No one has been able to confirm or deny that Mushroom Kingdom Hearts is Wii bound. If I have been had then I have to laugh at myself for buying this story hook line and sinker but there is nothing funny about stealing someones works and passing it off as your own.
I was checking digg.com today and I found another story about Mushroom Kingdom Hearts upon clicking the link to the story I was shocked at what I saw. My story about the EGM blurb has been posted word for word by someone named Pinata on www.vgcharts.org.
He used my image, he posted my misspelling of SquEnix, he even submitted the story to digg and received more diggs than me. No link was made to my post and absolutely no credit was given. I contacted vgcharts.org and asked the following questions.
ME - One of your users or contributors has blatantly stolen one of my posts.
My name is Tim Ashdown and I write www.wiirally.com for 451 Press LLC and someone named Pinata has stolen content from my website word for word. No link or credit is given. Any comment?
VGCHARTS - Not really, it happens all the time and the contributors are allowed to do
whatever they want - there is an option to cite a source but they
obviously chose not to…
ME - So you guys plagiarise people’s work all the time?
VGCHARTS - It’s user - submitted news. Just a blog-style page where people post the latest news stories. I could probably find 4-5 other places that have used your story (by a law of averages) - be flattered.
This leads me to believe that this is common practice at vgcharts.org. Be flattered? Not only is this dishonest and unethical I’m pretty sure it’s illegal too but I’m not a lawyer. 451 Press LLC is now handling the matter I will update all of you with further developments. I know this happens to journalists all the time but this is a first for me and I must say I feel dirty. I used to think that vgcharts.org was a reputable organization but I guess I was wrong.
My post
Plagiarism post
[UPDATE-1] VGcharts.org has since added a link to Wii Rally to the post. The victory is bitter sweet however the addition of the link comes after the site stole a whole days worth of Digg traffic away from my little site. I really appreciate being ripped off like that. I wonder if they’re going to send me a check for lost revenue too? Or at least apologise.