Thieves and plagiarists

For writers like me who have a life with limited spare time it is virtually impossible to fight all the people who simply copy and paste others' texts, so all i can do is expose the plagiarists on this page and ask the public to help me shame them.

  • 2019: The page https://www.discogs.com/artist/538418-Dzyan is a copy of my page https://www.scaruffi.com/vol3/dzyan.html Unfortunately, discogs.com makes it difficult to report copyright violations (like all websites relying on content for their revenues when they go mainstream).
  • 2015: This Daniel Margrain must be the biggest plagiarist around these days (2015). His reviews on Amazon are plagiarized from others and now he has his own website where he publishes his plagiarized texts http://cultureandpolitics.org. also http://www.danielmargrain.com/ He has yet again taken my ideas and language for blog posts about The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico http://cultureandpolitics.org/2015/08/15/whats-so-great-about-the-velvet-underground-and-nico/, Pink Floyd's The Piper of the Gates of Dawn http://cultureandpolitics.org/2015/08/30/whats-so-great-about-piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn/, Roxy Music's self-titled debut http://cultureandpolitics.org/2015/08/22/whats-so-great-about-roxy-music/ etc etc. All of his writing appears to be just stolen from others. Again in a manner to make the plagiarism less detectable he has rearranged and spread out my ideas and words but is still obviously ripping off my work throughout the posts. Examples.
    Daniel Margrain on The Velvet Underground and Nico: "The group didn't produce `songs' that were indicative of popular music of the time but rather they were Freudian expressions of a lust for deviant but seductive behaviour; they were exotic, decadent and perverse fantasies allied to hyper-urban realism that emerged from a combination of traditions - Pop art, German Expressionism, French Existentialism, La Monte Young's Minimilism... Maureen Tucker played the drums with an obsessive and frenzied, yet exotic, tribal repetitiveness... This was embellished by the icy vocals of Nico who sang lead on three of the album's tracks - the cold, spectral, autumnal odes of "Femme Fatale", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "I'll Be Your Mirror" - and back-up on "Sunday Morning", all of them masterpieces... the percussive boogie of "Waiting For My Man", the orgasmic chaos of "Heroin", and the dissonant tribalism of "European Son". If I had to pick a standout, it would be the Indian raga imbued and decadent "Venus In Furs" which is one of the masterpieces of all rock... It's an album that fuses music and words in a manner that perfectly captures the tension of modernist metropolitan reality in all of its dark and decadent secrets that" (http://cultureandpolitics.org/2015/08/15/whats-so-great-about-the-velvet-underground-and-nico)
    vs. excerpts from my page on The Velvet Underground and their debut: "The Velvet Underground And Nico (1967), recorded in the spring of 1966, includes an impressive number of masterpieces (mostly penned by Lou Reed and John Cale, and sung by Nico): the cold, spectral, autumnal odes of Femme Fatale, All Tomorrow's Parties and Black Angel's Death Song, the percussive boogie of Waiting For My Man, the orgasmic chaos of Heroin, the dissonant tribal music of European Son, the Indian raga imbued with decadent spleen of Venus In Furs. They are immersed in the dark, oppressive atmosphere of German expressionism and French existentialism, but they also exhaled an epic libido: each song was a sexual fetish, and a cathartic sadomaso release. It was difficult to find a precedent for the Velvet Underground's music, because these barbarians were educated to the classical lieder and to LaMonte Young's minimalism, while they borrowed very little from rock'n'roll and pop music... From this perfect fusion of music and words gushes a pathos that captures the metropolitan reality in its most secret and depressing folds... The vision of the Velvet Underground is urban hyper-realism filtered through a mind perennially dimmed by drug addiction and perverse fantasies." (http://www.scaruffi.com/vol2/velvet.html)
    Interestingly he gives me credit for a block quote of merely two sentences halfway through his post on The Velvet Underground album but nearly everything in the post is obviously stolen from me and he attempts to pass it all off, save those two sentences, as his own as shown through the above compared excerpts.
    The same goes for Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (which he did not give you any sort of credit for) and appears to have translated my review of Roxy Music's self-titled debut and again used it as his own with no credit given.
    The "Share this" portion of his webpage are showing that others are re-blogging and sharing it on other sites, unwittingly spreading plagiarism of my work around unnoticed.
  • This is actually funny: my Beatles review posted on vice.com (http://www.vice.com/read/the-top-10-worst-beatles-songs) albeit in rap style:
  • 2014: Daniel Margrain "hairy marx" http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3D17PCA7DGU2Q/ref=cm_pdp_rev_all?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview (2014) has repeatedly copied, pasted and slightly altered my reviews of music to post them on Amazon as his own (an incredible idiot who literally gifts my texts to Amazon for free without even benefiting from it): http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3D17PCA7DGU2Q/ref=cm_pdp_rev_all?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview Eg he wrote of Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust "What emerged was a shallow, calculating self-publicist and an inventor of artificial stances and attitudes - a superficial showman whose compositions are facile and cliched and for whom 'image' is everything." I wrote "Ziggy (was) a calculating inventor of artificial stances and attitudes... Bowie owed little to his fragile and facile compositions: he owed almost everything to the 'image' that he had created and was nurturing with non-musical factors." See also how he took my texts for Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Morphine's Good, etc. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QGW7WWRFO8FN/ref=cm_cr_rev_detup_redir?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B000005RS5&cdForum=Fx2TUXWVT5XCLD5&cdPage=1&cdThread=Tx173Y1P7NZFAVV&newContentID=Mx311MT537N8K9X&store=music#Mx311MT537N8K9X Note that corporations like Amazon make it extremely difficult to report abuses: it is in their interest that you steal texts from other people's websites and post them on Amazon's. De facto this idiot is helping Amazon steal texts legally: i cannot sue Amazon if i don't first complain about the plagiarist and complain about the plagiarist is terribly difficult and time-consuming, and meanwhile Amazon can claim that they have committed absolutely no crime, it is just one of their readers who is out of line. Magrain has also done exact copies of my work previously as seen on a review for Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1Y3Y5EN7M088C/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000002P5U#wasThisHelpful) and out of order collages of entire sentences for Faust's s/t (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RKYN72U2N1LGT/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00005KKB6#wasThisHelpful), eventually getting called out for it and so then began watering future reviews down with changes of word order, phrase omissions and synonym replacements, amusingly basking in the glory when complimented on the writing in the comments section. I would say he is borderline psychotic impersonating me without naming me. He grotesquely reworked my review of Trout Mask Replica: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RSN9UGCO7DE3R/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000005JA8#wasThisHelpful Etc etc.
    Below are links to my original texts that he plagiarized (but pretty much all of his reviews are stolen from other people's websites):
    Talk Talk
    Morphine
    Beatles
    Jimi Hendrix
    Faust
    Captain Beefheart
    David Bowie
  • Another Amazon "reviewer" who copied several of my reviews is Oliver Morelia: e.g. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00042YJJ2/ref=pdp_new_dp_review is a copy of my review of Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra.
  • 2013: Guilherme Rodrigues seem to be translating several of my pages in Portuguese, omitting the source and crediting himself as the author. For example, http://musicalmilitia.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/the-red-crayola-the-parable-of-arable-land-1967/ is simply by Red Crayola review in Portuguese.
  • Biggest plagiarizer (or plain thief) of the 2000s: Dave Strickson, a pathetic blogger who copied entire chapters of my history of rock music starting with http://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2009/07/definitive-history-of-rock-music-pt-1.html And apparently he's even running for office in his country. This scumbag certainly promises to be a honest politician! Note that Google (the owner of Blogger) has been repeatedly informed of this copyright infringement but has never acted.
  • 2010: Warner (a big corporation who often leads crusades against kids who download music illegally) has stolen texts from my website like this one http://www.warnermusic.ie/index.php/component/content/article/34-artist-page/83-defttones.html (2009). It took years to get Warner to do something about it. I just want people to remember what the music industry does illegally (the same industry that sends the FBI to your house if you do something illegally to them).
  • 2010: Several readers reported seeing my texts used (without authorization and without credit)on last.fm The magnitude of the case is alarming. It is hard to believe that the management of last.fm has nothing to do with this praxis. Let me know when you find texts that are clearly plagiarized from mine.
  • 2007: http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/2007/03/masayuki-takayanagi-new-direction-call.html is a copy of this page of mine
  • 2006: http://www.history-of-rock.com/rock_and_roll_timeline.htm (2006) is an unauthorized copy of my timeline of rock music (Thief: DK Peneny, "history-of-rock.com")

I thank the readers that provide information about plagiarists. Click here to write to me.

A correspondence about Copyright infringement and Lycos is emblematic of how the big commercial websites de facto encourage their customers to steal content from other websites. Amazon or Last does not steal content from us. They don't need to. Their users do it for them. Users like the ones listed above are stealing content from websites like me and gifting it to Amazon pages for free. Amazon benefits from this practice because the more content the better, and legally it is not guilty. In the old days a commercial website like Amazon had to buy content in order to populate their pages with professional reviews. Now they rely on plagiarists to steal the content. It is indeed a great business plan.