Janelle managed to stay out of enough trouble to keep her visitation privileges and was led one day to the visitation room when her husband came to visit her.
Janelle smiled and seemed rather upbeat, perhaps to ease her husband's worries or to appear like all was just fine and dandy—one could only guess.
“How's everything going?” she asked.
Steven shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well, your journal and story have been published.”
Janelle continued to stare at her husband. Then she blinked and shook her head in confusion. It seemed to take several seconds for this information to register. “Huh?” she finally asked, confused.
“They published both your journal and your story.”
“I don't understand. Are you talking about the little bits and pieces I shared in an email with a friend? But I never shared the story with anyone else.”
“There are ways. Plus, you backed it up online.”
Janelle remembered how she backed up her journals and stories by placing them in the bodies of emails that she wouldn’t send to anyone.
“I still don't get it. If it was never public, how could anyone get a hold of it unless they hacked the account I had it backed up on?”
“You'd be surprised.”
Shock, horror, and embarrassment began to take shape in Janelle's facial features. Then, not at all to Steven's surprise, her eyes darkened to jet black as her initial emotions morphed into rage. “You're saying someone hacked my account and published them somewhere without my permission?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Where did they publish them?”
“On the internet.”
“I know, doofus, but where? That's got to be totally illegal.”
“I’m afraid it's not. You know how the media is.”
“So you mean the media published it on their website? Come on, you've got to give me more information so I can jump on this fast to get them removed.”
“You can't get them removed.”
“But they published my work without my permission. What is the name of the damn website?”
“I don't know exactly. I'll have to look into it.”
“As soon as you go home, I want you to find out as much info as possible and mail it to me. Hacking is illegal, and so is publishing someone's work without their permission. We can sue them silly for this.”
“Well, you can try,” Steven said doubtfully.
“Oh, I'll do more than try.”
“I just don't think you'll be able to win.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I'm just telling you.”
“Yeah, I know. Your favorite thing to do. But if they stole my stuff and published it without my permission, I don't see how that could be okay with any judge unless they're even sicker and more twisted than I gave them credit for.”
“It's who you are. It's all about who you are.”
“It doesn't matter. I'm still a human being with the same rights as everyone else.”
“Not quite.”
“Yes, quite. Just because I'm in jail doesn't mean you should be able to steal my stuff and get credit for it while you're at it. I will sue their asses for this.”
And much to her husband's amazement, Janelle did just that. She asked him to be present for support in court, and to her surprise, he was. Not so much to support her, of course, but out of curiosity. He wanted to watch his wife in action as she battled for rights to her so-called life experiences and creative works. He just hadn’t expected the judge to rule in her favor.
“I worked on those journals for seven years. Seven years of my work published without my permission,” Janelle complained to the judge. “Seven years. And that includes a short story I wrote. Now, I'm flattered that someone was interested enough in my work and felt it was worth publishing, but it shouldn't have been done without my permission first, nor should any website I used to store documents be hacked. Had they come to me about a publishing contract for anything I've written, that would have been one thing. But to go ahead and steal my work and publish it as their own and make a profit off of it.”
A woman representing the website that published Janelle's “work” spoke up. “We never published anything as if we were the ones that authored it. We specifically named Janelle Stone as having authored the journals and the short story.”
“Again, I'm flattered someone finds me publishable, but still…” Janelle insisted stubbornly, a hint of a whine present in her voice.
“Do you feel it might have something to do with who you are more than the actual contents of your writing?” the judge asked.
“I don't know. I just know I didn't authorize any of my work to be published at my expense. Never once was I offered a contract or royalties or anything.”
Although the publishing company was never penalized in any real way, they agreed to remove the journals and the silly “story” even though there were numerous websites that likely grabbed their own copies. They were also ordered to pay Janelle the money they had generated from her writings as well as additional fees, which only totaled a few hundred dollars at the time the complaint was lodged against the company.
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