I consider myself to be somewhat of a levelheaded person. I'll admit, many things annoy me and make me overreact, but few things provoke me to the point of anger. Recently, however, I was the victim of one of these few things, reawakening my sleeping anger that had not seen the light of day for so long. I'll spare you the gruesome details of how I obtained said knowledge, but I was recently made aware of multiple plagiarism incidents - at once.

First and foremost was an incident in which a 14 year old, who could barely even manage to write English, began stealing works from other people, claiming them to be his own. Now, this ticks me off for two reasons. The first reason is that I also consider myself an artist, and I don't buy into the "take it as a compliment" crap. I sure as hell wouldn't want my works plastered with some whiny little kid's name on it. The second reason is the stupidity that was involved in this incident. Not only did the kid steal works from several artists (of whom many had completely different styles), but he also claimed that his name was on all of them in Japanese, even though some of the artist names were clearly written in Chinese. And for those who aren't learned in Asian languages, yes, there is a difference.

The second incident happened to myself on the site that I run. Now, someone saw fit to take my entire layout and paste it on his own. If that wasn't bad enough, he was leeching off of my site for most of the images, except my banner and copyright logo, which he "carefully"changed so that they read "Chuck's Corner"instead of "Ashton's Aisle."Fortunately, the web hosting service he was using was very cooperative in shutting down any abuses of their system, so his site was quickly shut down. However, this brings back to me a problem that I've long forgotten ­ the problem of plagiarism.

Just because you're too lazy to create something yourself does not give you the right to steal someone else's hard work and slap your ugly ass insignia on it and claim it as your own. If you want someone to say that your work is good, here's an idea for you. Maybe you should take your own two hands, and draw something yourself. Learn to hold a pencil without having a seizure first, and then we'll talk. Until then, do us REAL artists a favor and keep your grubby, slimy hands off of our works of art.