Stealing a blogger's story

I was reading through some news headlines and found one titled:

Lifting of blogger's story triggers online furor

In short a magazine took/stole/"lifted" another blogger's story and made some changes and then published it.  The author who came to find out about it sent a letter of complaint and was responded to in a very unprofessional manner.   The response is below.  The author of the blog's name is Monica.

"But honestly Monica, the Web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offense and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"
 

This generated all sorts of traffic to the magazine's facebook page where fans went from 12 to over 5000 in just few days.  Everyone going to the page is leaving humorous slams against the magazine named Cook Source.  

Moral of the story, always be professional because you never know if something you write will unite the masses to savage your reputation on the internet. 


This isn't the end.  The editor of the magazine attempted to start up a new facebook page but it was quickly identified.  After publishing this post  I came across article after article talking about this whole mess.  People have even gone as far as creating webpages addressing it!  Oh, this all went down last Thursday.  Within a matter of only 2 days, tens of thousands have heard of the unfortunate blogger and how her work was taken from her.