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Old 02-06-2014, 03:26 PM   #25
cromag
Surfin the alpha waves ~~
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Posts: 26,355
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Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: New Jersey
Device: Jetbook Lite & Mini, Nook STR, Kobo, Hanvon N516, Kindle 2, Androids
An update.

First, the audio has been withdrawn -- at least temporarily.

I got a long email from the webmaster/executive producer at the site. He stated that their website is fairly new and that they are trying to be a legitimate market for short horror fiction.

The beginning of the email was pretty apologetic. According to him, they received my story as a submission at their website by someone using my name and claiming to be me. That person provided links to my Smashwords author page and the story at Amazon. They performed a Google search -- but that only confirmed that someone with my name wrote that story. He didn't go into detail, but he did say that they were apparently "swindled."

By the end of the email he was a bit defensive. He pointed out that two people have represented themselves as me and how does he know who is who. He asked me for some proof that I am who I say I am, and that I own the copyright.

My first response was to log into my account at Smashwords and take a screenprint of my profile, clearly showing that I have the ability to edit my biography, change my account details, etc.


But this poses an interesting problem. If someone using your name sold the rights to one of your stories ... how would you prove that it was your story, and that you are you?

This story is an interesting case. I wrote it 35 years ago, which means I wrote it on a typewriter (an Olivetti Editor II, a wonderful machine). In the years since then I moved four times, but somewhere in my crawlspace I probably still have the onionskin carbon copies (there go the young kids, off to Wikipedia), a copy of the check from the magazine (with a conditional endorsement granting "First North American Serial Rights") and my correspondence with various editors. It would be a pain in the butt, but I might be able to find it.

But today I do all of my writing on a computer. How would I demonstrate that my .doc file was the original?

(There's probably a story in there!)
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