More at: http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/ ... et_revenge...writer Monica Gaudio, who was surprised to learn this week that the small culinary magazine Cooks Source had lifted her five-year-old story for medieval cookery blog Gode Cookery entitled "A Tale of Two Tarts" wholesale for its recent Pumpkin Fest issue. Cooks Source epic mistake number one: taking work without compensating or even contacting the writer.
Gaudio contacted the magazine via e-mail, and when editor Judith Griggs asked what she would like her to do for her, she replied, "I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism."
What she got instead was this: "Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, ... I do know about copyright laws. It was 'my bad' indeed, ... But honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, ... you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!" (- sorry, couldn't help that )
Let's just call that e-mail Griggs's epic mistake numbers one through zillion: the blatant misunderstanding of the concept of public domain, the insulting the work of the person she'd stolen from, the "at least we didn't plagiarize" defense, and the real kicker, the absurd, Ginni Thomas-style "No, you should compensate me!" business.
Deciding that a payment in the form of shoddy reasoning and dismissive snark was unsatisfying, Gaudio then did what so many little guys have done when in the face of rudeness and stonewalling. On Wednesday, she crowdsourced it, with a brief blog recap of the whole ugly story and an invitation that "I have some ideas of where to go from here but I am more than willing to listen to other suggestions."
That's all it took. What began as a few comments advising her to get some good legal counsel quickly snowballed as the collective outrage moved off Gaudio's LiveJournal page and onto – where else? – Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly the little magazine's Facebook page was accumulating new "fans" like a warm apple pie attracts scoops of vanilla ice cream. Let the hilarious public shaming commence!
What had perhaps once been a basic fan page and – too bad for Cooks Source – online version of the magazine/damning evidence of its bad behavior – has now become the virtual stockade. ... But more than just expressing indignation, enterprising Facebookers have quickly compiled a list of the magazine's advertisers, the better to contact them about its dubious practices. They also cleverly deduced that Gaudio was unlikely the only writer they'd ever pulled this stunt with. While you can't copyright lists of ingredients, thankfully you also still can't flat out steal other people's work. Sure enough, when Facebookers combed the online pages of the magazine, they found dozens of examples of articles and photos, lifted from Weight Watchers, Food Network, Martha Stewart, Sunset and NPR among others. Oh God, they are so hosed. ...
You could knock me over with a feather after I browsed the Facebook discussion thread about all the lifted content in the magazine. I mean these people apparently sold stolen work - and they appear to have been stupid enough to steal even from DISNEY! Who is that suicidal???
If I was a bookie, I would give about 100:1 odds on that the magazine will go belly up before New Year.
. And then when they come back, they can 
Thank you kindly!
