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The Pen is Mightier than the Sword
The Story of Ivan Mor Smirnoff
The passive-aggressive take-down of an unrepentant plagiarist
They say that the pen is mightier than the sword. In that case, never anger a writer. A number of years ago, several writers and I found that our work was being used on various web sites without our permission or knowledge. Some of these posts were intensely personal; more than one of them dealt with grief following the death of a loved one. While waiting for a response to my legitimate copyright violation notices and subsequent DMCA take-down notice, I decided to have a little fun with the scum — er, plagiarist — who, according to WHOIS, was in the Ukraine.
I invented the character, Ivan Mor Smirnoff — obviously, this plagiarist had driven me to drink , and the name just came to me in a flash of inspiration — and I began a little correspondence with the nefarious Ukrainian. He was now ostensibly taking submissions to a fake blog post repository, where other bloggers were encouraged to republish “free articles” (all stolen content that had been modified to contain backlinks to his other blog properties and “spun” sufficiently to pass most online plagiarism checkers — except that people’s names, sometimes family members, including deceased loved ones, had passed through unscathed)…
