FAHA: copied chairman's award quotes

FIRST General Forum
1

Did this ever happen to you? You work so hard on creating a piece of great writing, and then someone cme alone and borrow it without giving you credit at all. It’s not like you did it for credit or anything, the quality of writing is its own reward. But it still would be nice to be acknowledged for the work you’ve done. Let’s take a look at this fellow FIRST-a-holic’s experience with such situation.

While browsing different team’s webpages, I found the chairman’s award entry for one team. In it was a paragraph that sounded very familiar. After looking around a little, I realized it was something I had written a year or two earlier, grammar errors and all.

Now, I would have no problem with it if they had attributed it to me, or even attributed it to “unknown” (if they had lost track of where it came from). However, it was just in the body of their entry, like it was their original work.

Has anyone ever run into a situation like this? It’s not that big of an issue anyways, and they deserve to win the chairman’s award with or without the quote, it just sort of disturbs me.

2

It is possible that the team does not even realize that they are using your words. Depending on when and how it was captured 2 years ago, those same students may not longer be on the team, or not part of the Chairman’s preparation team. They may have found the words in a file or document somewhere and not even considered they were from someone outside of their team.

I would contact the team (PM or email, not thru this forum) and ask if they were aware they were using your words. You might even include a copy of you document.

I would assume it was an innocent mistake and just bring it to their attention to avoid their continued use of the words without providing proper credit to the author.