If imitation is the highest form of flattery, I must be very boring

2005-02-03T23:06:00Z

sassylawyer has been plagiarized. That got me to
thinking about plagiarism, and you know? I don’t think I’ve ever been
badly plagiarized. Probably not a single line maliciously lifted from my Ph104 or
JapanTraining notes.
No one reposts me to get +5 Insightful or to increase post count on
some bulletin board. I saw a number of Google queries poking around my
notebook directory back when I still had files from college,
but those were probably people who would’ve copied netlists or
programs from elsewhere on the Net, anyway.

Conclusion: I must be really boring. ;)

I suppose it also helps that the only things I post on my blog are
random code snippets, bad short stories, business ideas,
and my TODO list, all of which can be freely reposted anywhere you want.
(In fact, please steal my TODO list!)

The only people who read my blog are geeks, my family and my friends.
They’re all smarter than I am and have no problems coming up with
insightful posts on their own.

I’m not concerned about plagiarism. I trust that if my thoughts are
being posted to a forum by someone who’s too lazy to think up cool
stuff, the mere fact that the poster would think other people would
find such things interesting means that some of the readers might’ve
stumbled across my blog before. Then they laugh at the poster,
completely destroying the poster’s reputation. Mwahaha.

Even if I never get attributed, it’s nice that the ideas are out
there. My ideas are more important than my byline. I don’t care who
eventually makes stuff happen as long as the stuff happens. I learn by
writing, and I lose nothing if people copy me. If people go to the
trouble of stripping out my identity, then they’ll just have to deal
with questions and bugs themselves.

I don’t care if people stumbling upon my work never bother to find out
who I am. If they find something in my braindump useful, well and
good. If they copy-and-paste what I’ve written into something they
need to submit for class or work, they’ve lost the opportunity to
exercise their mind.

If someone ever accuses me of plagiarizing my own work, I’ll simply
laugh and point to the other stuff I’ve written or to the things I’ve
done. People know I’m real.

So there. I trust you, reader. I’ll never use Javascript hacks to make
it difficult for you to save data from my website.
I’ll never make it difficult for you to syndicate my blog
(RSS feed) or copy it
whole-sale. Heck, if you want
an archive of my planner, either wget -r
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/plans/ or e-mail me for an archive.

Go ahead and steal my thoughts. Add your insights. Make them better.

Sacha Chua - tag - principles

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, I must be very boring