Give Me Back My Intellectual Property!!

Online I found an old paper I wrote in college, many moons ago. The crazy part is that it was on SchoolSucks.com, a website that I glanced at once or twice out of desperation back in the day, but never bothered to plagiarize from because I knew it was supremely stupid to copy material from something that could be run through a search engine in about five seconds. It’s the perfect test of intelligence for students; if they’re too dumb to realize that their teachers know how to use google.com, they deserve an F.

I wrote it more than ten years ago, and it wasn’t a bad essay. It was on “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli. What I’d really like to know is how they got it in the first place. I didn’t sell it to them. I didn’t give it to them. And it pisses me off that somebody is peddling something I created, even if it’s as trivial as some dumb essay from a million years back.

I wrote them a nasty gram telling them the unauthorized use of my intellectual property was not to my liking. They’ll probably ignore me or just tell me to go pound sand. And, sad to say, it may be within their legal rights to do that, especially if their servers are in a country that doesn’t really care about privacy, fairness, or preventing exploitation.

It does raise some pretty disturbing questions– if some digital dumpster diver comes up with something you wrote, do they have the right to publish it? And what can you do against them? Legal action is a royal pain to engage in, and most sites like SchoolSucks.com are probably willing to take the gamble that you’re not really going to sue them over one little infringement of your intellectual property. No, what you’d really need is a class action lawsuit . . . hmm . . . class action lawsuit . . .

Anybody else have papers on SchoolSucks.com?