Friday, April 20, 2012

heisting {& hate}

I have been naughty and haven't posted anything for the Pagan Blog Project in a while. While I have had all these ideas on topics I wanted to write about, I haven't really been motivated to be honest. So here is a just-winging-it post {letter H}.

Heisting. The online Pagan community seems to be rife with it when it comes to lifting the works of others. Two situations in particular that stick out in my mind are this one and this one.

These two situations were balls-out theft. Their articles and artworks were posted on other sites being masqueraded as the work of the people who stole them. More often what I notice are people who don't properly cite sources and/or creators of articles and creative works that they are sharing.

So please people. Don't steal. Properly cite. It's called good manners and it only takes a little bit of extra time.

Another situation that has been going on recently surrounds Z Budapest and a song that she apparently wrote 40 years ago. I don't know if she owns the rights to the song or not. On her Facebook page she had posted:
Singing "We all come from the Goddess" should NOT BE rewritten. It is my intellectual property. it is NOT a folk song, which by the way is the fate of many composers whose songs are stolen. You steal my song from now will have consequences. You put men into the song, like God,a hex will be activated. I have found that people actually sell their wares with my song in the Title
It certainly would suck to have someone else take your song, profit from it without your permission or giving you proper credit. There is however, something in the above quote that made me do a double take. The whole cursing over men and god wording. But wait! It gets better!
but i have experienced women making up new words,attaching it to my song that NEEDS NO attachments. Have you ever heard a man writing a song about the gods, and then put females in it?? Never. So stop you generosity attacks with my songs, write an original. Men who had Mozart and Schubert amongst them,surely will come up with their own songs .

Women like to give away and include but please do it with your own intellectual property. I wrote that song for the Goddess worshipping women..
Then in a later post she states that she only wants people to sing it in the original version. I don't know how she is going to control that in private environments, save sending out a whole bunch of curses to take care of those dastardly men and class-trader women. I guess that is not an option though, since has claimed that the threat of hexing was all snark and no bite. Not the swiftest move on her part, making threats if she had no intention of carrying them through if need be.

It seems to me that she wants to protect her song more out of hate {in this case misandry, she is already known for her disgusting transphobia} than out of love for her song and religious/spiritual devotion.

Sláinte!

Laurel

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Here! Here!

When I read Z's words I admit I thought it might have been a late Aptil Fools joke. Alas it seems her bitterness is all encompassing. I wonder if someone has already hexed her?

Harzgeist said...

I couldn't agree more on the plagiarism issue.

Reading Z's statement made me sad, however. After all, there ARE men and women (and so many beautiful humans in-between those sex or gender distinctions), as well as Gods and Goddesses. So providing we don't make financial profit from it we should be able to change and use any song in our rituals that we feel honours our deities best.

Seren said...

It's extremely frustrating having to deal with plagiarists. I had to issue another takedown against the same blogger in January this year because I found that she'd reposted some of the articles that had been removed by the previous takedown - again. For the third time. There are other posts of mine on there which she's chopped, changed and tweaked slightly, with no attribution of course, but I haven't been able to have those removed. They're not the exact same so it's harder to prove that she's plagiarised me, in spite of the fact that there are sentences and phrases that are directly lifted from my page.

The problem is, if I post publicly about it, "Lady" Cattra just puts her blog to invitation only for a while. And, the last time I publicised her actions on my blog, threatened to sue me for libel, slander, *and* defamation! It beggars beliefs, quite frankly.

It's beyond offensive, but people like this are the price you have to pay if you believe that this sort of thing should be freely available. Then there are the just plain stupid ones, like the website that's hosting one of my pictures of a Selkirk bannock to illustrate a recipe for Fife bannock!

nefaeria said...

Bellatrix: That possibility could perhaps explain the bitterness. ;)

Harzgeist: Agreed. :)

Seren: I am sorry to hear that the drama continues. The stupidity of these asshats is outstanding. It would appear that others are continued targets as well. It would be great if they would all be sucked into the bowels of the Earth or something.