For those of you that are interested, Peri submitted a poem called 'Hope' which contained a lot of lyrics from the song Mamma Mia by Abba. We do not allow copyright works to be used in publications. This has been covered many times and I won't be going over it again now - you can read Nicola's official post here if you wish:
https://www.lushstories.com/forum/yaf_postst56045_Plagiarism.aspx
Jen, who is one of the most lovely people you could ever wish to meet, brought this to Peri's attention and asked her about it. Peri claimed it was a complete coincidence which does not seem likely due to the fact that the lines were word-for-word identical. When other poems were checked out of curiosity and found to again contain song lyrics by other bands such as Modern Talking, Peri was confronted about it. Peri's defensive response was simply, "Regarding other poems, if you feel the same way, please take action as per Lush Policy".
Our time as volunteers is limited. We are a finite resource that is best served processing the new stories that get submitted to the site on a daily basis. To sift through a member's entire publication history for infringing content because they are not prepared to assist you is crazy. Peri was not prepared to take down herself any other poems with dubitable content and so we took down all of them. This in return resulted in a disgruntled message to the site in complaint, and the messages she recently posted in the forum and sent out via PM containing "Relevant extracts of the reply of Senior Moderator Liz".
The problem with relevant extracts is that they remove a lot of context. To that end, please find below the complete text of the "disgusting response" that I sent.
Hi Peri,
I am writing to you in response to a message you sent into the helpdesk. It relates to the fact that your stories have been removed from the site. You asked two specific questions regarding this which I would like to answer for you now:
1. Do all my stories contain “plagiarized” content? If yes, I’d like to know about it (which line or verse?).
If you have plagiarized song lyrics to use in your publications, then you would know which ones they are. The moderators of Lush have neither the time nor the motivation to trawl through your entire back-catalogue of poems and sift through them for lines you have lifted from songs. We started by identifying one, then two, then three, and frankly that was enough. The examples reported by Jen contained more than just a single line here and there. For example, your poem Hope is approx 50% Mamma Mia lyrics.
2. Can a mod remove stories like that? Not the one she highlighted but all the stories?
Yes. The decision was actually a mutual one following a discussion about the best way to deal with this situation. You were given every opportunity by Jen to assist in identifying the poems with questionable content and yet decided not to, stating only that it must all be a coincidence and that she should 'do what she must'. Clearly, you were not interested in owning up to the misdeed and resolving it, therefore we have removed everything.
I think perhaps you underestimate how seriously this site takes intellectual copyright theft. Taking someone else's work, be it a writer, or band, or whoever, and then publishing it as your own either wholly or in part, is simply unacceptable. We consider it a cardinal sin and most offenders are very quickly shown the door. You should consider yourself extremely lucky to still have your account on Lush.
I trust this answers your questions but should you have any more, you are welcome to message me directly and I will try my best to answer them.
Kind regards,
Liz
Senior Moderator
The moderators on Lush try to be as honest and open as possible, there is no cloak and dagger nonsense going on. We usually don't make a point of publicly providing details when something like this happens, but Peri was a popular member on Lush and based on the content of the messages she sent out, I felt things required clarifying. I hope this has demonstrated the opportunities given to this member to resolve the issue and the frankly extraordinary leniency offered under the circumstances.
Liz
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