An Open Letter to a Thief

On the internet it is far too easy to take what someone else has written and claim it was you who wrote it. Only our own sense of morality stops us from doing this. But unfortunately some people do not feel that sense of morality. They do not see the problem, or simply do not care.

Some people do not see fan fiction as a legitimate form of art. Some people do not realise that even fan fiction writers spend countless hours at their craft, take pride in it, show unbelievable amounts of passion for it and feel those same emotions that all content creators feel about their work—whether it be pride, or that they are simply not good enough. This kind of thinking opens the door for another kind of thinking—that it is okay to take this work and claim it as your own. It’s on the internet, it’s not real art, therefore it’s fair game, right?

Wrong.

When you copy another writer’s work and take the credit for writing it, you invalidate the time and effort the original author put into that story. You discourage hundreds of potentially amazing authors from sharing their work online due to fear of it being taken without their permission. You drive people to delete their work, abandon their accounts and quit writing because they are too exhausted to deal with people like you. And you are breaking not only the terms and conditions of whatever sites you have taken the stories from and uploaded them to, but you are breaking the LAW.

You think it’s insignificant, that you won’t get caught, that even if you do, no one will care because, hey, it’s just fan fiction. But for some people, fan fiction is an escape from a troubled life, it’s a reward after a stressful day, it’s a way of improving skills, and a gateway into a real career in writing.

It is important to a lot of people and you are shitting on that importance by taking credit for something that is not yours to take.

But let me tell you something.

Until you have agonised over the placement of every single word, until you have hit that backspace key a million times before you are finally satisfied, until you have been through hours, days, WEEKS of writer’s block, or endured that little voice in your head telling you it will never be good enough—YOU DO NOT DESERVE THAT CREDIT.

Until you have experienced firsthand everything a content creator goes through to get their work out there—the anxiety, the doubt, the sleepless nights trying to get that last line perfect—you will never deserve it.

Please do not take another writer’s work and claim it as your own. It will not make you happy. You will not feel that sense of pride in a work that is not your own. You will not feel that warmth that spreads through you when someone compliments you on the story, because you did not put in the work to earn it.

You might get away with it for a time. Hell, you might even get away with it entirely—the internet is big place. But you will never know the wonderful feeling of having created something that is a pure product of your imagination and yours alone.

And I pity you for that.