Hello, hello!
We’ve noticed that there has been yet another case of a person reposting fics from AO3 to Wattpad. We’re not gonna share the link because that person has already deleted their profile.
But we feel like we must talk about this here, a blog where a lot of writers and readers converge.
Reposting is when you cut-and-paste a work that is not your own onto a new post or an entirely different site. (Reblogging, on the other hand, is just passing along the work under its original poster, on its original site, without any cut-and-paste.)
For the newbies: reposting works, be they fic, art, or meta, is stealing. Simple as that. You may not mean anything by it, but reposting without the original creator's explicit authorization is stealing.
When an author chooses a specific website where they decide to share their work, you can’t simply repost on another website, whatever your logic may be. They had their own reasons to choose the website they did (specially AO3). If you want to give that fic more visibility, you make rec lists, you share the link to the original story, you make art. And if you really, really want, you can ask the author directly if you can repost their fic to another website. If they say no, that’s also final.
In this recent case, the person was not plagiarizing the fics or claiming to have written them – they just reposted them with credit to the original author.
They explained that they were reposting these works for them to have easier access to the fics. That is not a good excuse! (There is no good excuse, actually.)
You don’t need to repost fics to get easy access to those works. AO3 has many ways to facilitate your access to different fics. You can
bookmark (with tags to make it easier for you to find)
you can mark for later
you can add fics to a collection (better to add a bookmark to a collection tho)
you can download the fic in many different formats and save them on your drive or cloud services and read even offline.
To reiterate: When you repost a fic, you are stealing. You are stealing the engagement, the kudos, the comments, the hits the original author may get. You make authors not want to write anymore if their fics are gonna be stolen like this. And no one in fandom wants that.
Wattpad is especially difficult to deal with, and asking them to remove stolen work is hard according to some writers trying to reach them.
So please. If you didn’t know before why this was bad, now you know.
We know there are a lot of newbies in this fandom, and it can sincerely be hard to know all these unwritten rules just by osmosis. If you have any trouble understanding the difference between reblogging and reposting works (or difficulties in understanding the difference between transformational works and plagiarism), let us know, and we’ll talk about it and try to make it more clear. All of us have been in fandom, in various ways, for over a decade, and we have a lot of experience to share.
We don’t want more creators giving up on fandom because of either newbie mistakes or genuine bad eggs who know what they’re doing is wrong and yet do it anyway.
And for people who navigate both AO3 and Wattpad, keep an eye out, and let us know if you find more reposting or plagiarizing on Wattpad.
~ Mods
