Late last year, I discovered that someone had written and distributed a press release that used some of my work in it without giving me credit, a not-uncommon occurrence when a large body of one’s work appears online. The press release was picked up and published by at least 10 sites.

One hundred percent convinced of the righteousness of my quest, I pursued the issue with the offender and particularly the offender’s employer (because the offender passed me off to a supervisor without ever directly responding to me). I was met with nothing by arrogance and threats.

I debated long and hard about whether to pursue the issue, which stuck in my craw and made my blood boil whenever I thought about it. But given the other party’s arrogance, I concluded that pursuing the offense would only fill me with toxic feelings and not get resolved without legal intervention, and I didn’t feel hiring an attorney was worth it.

So, I decided to drop it. Then I read an interview with SMITH Magazine’s Larry Smith on a site called The Rumpus. Regular readers know I’m a big fan of SMITH and its Six-Word Memoirs and have blogged about them multiple times.

Larry Smith’s situation was similar to mine. McGill University had used the six-word form to describe faculty and students without referencing the fact that SMITH was the inspiration for their six-word project. “… When someone essentially mirrors the exact ‘six-word memoir’ concept, we’d just like a nod — it’s the right thing to do,” Smith said. And that’s all I had asked for — either that the offender request that the sites that published the swiped material remove it or that they credit me for it.

What especially struck me about the situation was that my offender was also an academic. I could not avoid a feeling of disgust for the arrogance of academics who would never put up with this kind of theft of intellectual property from their students but who think nothing of practicing it themselves. It’s a little like Richard Nixon saying in Frost/Nixon that when the president breaks the law, it’s not illegal.

So, here’s the full story: The material in question was a set of unusual job-interview questions that appeared in an article I wrote on that subject a number of years ago. Some of the questions were standard oddball queries that most people have heard, such as “If you could have dinner with anyone from history, who would you choose?” Others, however, were questions I had crafted myself for use in mock interviews with my students.

The list of 15 questions credited to the offender appeared with the exact same wording and in the exact same order as in my article. A few other passages and phrases from my article were suspiciously similar.

I contacted the person, a staff member at a very large, well-known East Coast university, not in an accusing way, but more in the spirit of “let’s look at how this happened and see what can be done to fix it.”

I never once heard directly from this person. Instead, I heard from a dean, whose position was that interview questions are in the “public domain.” I can partially accept that position; after all, I would never presume to claim authorship for questions like “Why should I hire you?” or “What are your weaknesses?” But, again, these were unusual questions, some of which I had composed myself. And even if we accept that interview questions are in the public domain, why would this offender use the exact wording of my questions in the exact order? And how difficult would it be to simply indicate that the questions came from my article?

This dean went on to outrageously suggest that perhaps I had stolen the questions from the staff member and to threaten that if I contacted the outlets that ran the press release to ask them to credit the questions to me or remove the article, the school would take legal action against me.

Reading the interview with Larry Smith just reinforced the imperious attitude of academia. They can do no wrong but would never let their students get away with failing to credit a source.

In the Larry Smith case, however, the university did give in and credit SMITH for the six-word memoir concept — after a reporter wrote about it.

My approach here is to ventilate, get it out of my system, and see what my readers think. Obviously, I am sufficiently intimidated by these academic bullies that I am shielding the identity of the university, dean, and offender.

So what would you do? Forget it and move on? Engage an attorney? Pursue the issue on your own?

It would be a little difficult to fully celebrate World Storytelling Day on A Storied Career in the spirit intended — given that it is a celebration of the art of oral storytelling. Here’s how the World Storytelling Day site describes the event:

World Storytelling Day is a global celebration of the art of oral storytelling. It is celebrated every year on the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, the first day of autumn equinox in the southern. On World Storytelling Day, as many people as possible tell and listen to stories in as many languages and at as many places as possible, during the same day and night. Participants tell each other about their events in order to share stories and inspiration, to learn from each other and create international contacts.

This year’s theme is neighbors. Here’s a little more about the day and about preparing a story — from Andree Iffrig.

Though all the following are not fully in the oral storytelling spirit of the day, I thought I’d use this space to list what some of my Twitter “neighbors” have been saying about storytelling in the past few days:

• Debuting today for World Storytelling Day is Tactical Nomadic Storytelling, an art project by Pattie Belle Hastings that combines live storytelling and props with mobile digital media (visual and audio). The project is described as comprising a “mobile storytelling projection unit and a series of trickster stories that combine video/animation, audio, mobile devices and live performance.”
• In Second Life, you’ll find Virtual Macbeth participating in the The Virtual Worlds Story Project Presents: The Second Life Story Quest, a project running in as part of the celebrations of World Storytelling Day. From the organizers:
  

  The Story Quest brings writers from around the globe to participate in a fun-filled and challenging story writing exercise to celebrate World Storytelling Day. With five genres to choose from, writers will travel to a variety of sims, collect clues, and use elements of those sims to craft their stories.

• Storytelling continued to be a significant topic at South By Southwest (SXSW) festival/conference with much Twitter buzz focused on a Tuesday panel called The Future of Visual Storytelling is Interactive — Or Is It? Panelists included Panelist Victoria Ha, James Milward, Mark Pytlik, Phil Stuart, and Rick Webb. Here’s how the SXSW Web site described the panel:
  

  Whether online, on mobile phones, DVD or in physical spaces, the way we tell stories is … changing. What is the future of telling visual stories, with the reality of shorter attention spans, clickable culture and evolving technology that enables new ways to display and interact with cinematic content and narrative. This panel explore[d] the opportunities, challenges, technical and usability issues and whether any one actually cares about interactive films.

  At Cover It Live, you can read a transcript of the panel’s discussion.

  One blogger self-described as a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at Indiana University and a narratologist was disappointed with the panel, concluding that its members “had really little understanding of what narrative was.” A snippet:

  The model that was presented within the first five minutes was shockingly binary: on the one had we had the “passive” story-telling (which implied linear narrative models) on the other end of the spectrum we have “interactive” (which was egregiously labeled as “open-ended”).

• The Twitterverse also buzzed this week about Best NOTES on FILMMAKING and STORYTELLING on the NET.
• Huge buzz yesterday about an article on Advertising Age, Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling, in which Garrick Smith writes about visualizations that change the way we “create and consume narratives about events, products and services.” I’m having trouble seeing narrative/storytelling in the examples he cites, though I marvel at the amazing things being done to help us visualize data.