Larry Blumenfeld: September 2010 Archives

Have you ever felt the chill? You're fact-checking online like you do when you want to corroborate a cryptic fact or two, googling for a match so you don't have to change that sentence or, worse, fudge it. You click on a site you wouldn't normally visit, and then land on a sentence with a familiar ring. Then another. And another.

Wait a minute: This whole graf sounds like me, the next one too. Even the punctuation.

Turns out the entry for trombonist Glen David Andrews on the Last.fm site was stolen from a piece I did for the September 2008 issue of Jazziz. It wasn't the opening section or the closing part, just 266 words cut and pasted, hanging like a body part with no head, not to mention a byline or acknowledgement to me or to the magazine.

I'm sure many of you reading this have experienced this; I'm pretty sure more of my uncredited and stolen copy is out there in the digital clouds.

Now, I, like you, have come across uncredited quotes of my criticism, small details from my stories that were doubtful to have come from someone else punched into someone else's piece, even strings of word choices I'd agonized over, so I recognized them right off when I saw them.

I'd just never seen a sizeable piece of a story of mine, like a chunk of Gouda, up there with nothing else around it as cover, just stolen and offered up, before. Maybe I was just blind, lucky, or not that rich a source. 

If you click through lastfm.com's screens far enough to get to the "terms of use" and then scroll down enough to find the part about copyrights, you'll get all this: