Official Letterhead of The People of LWON
Dear Madam/Sir/Bot:
We are going to enjoy seeing this letter show up on your website. [Update, 6:17 a.m. 10/2/2017: The Modern Talking website may or may not have been taken down since yesterday. If so, we hope we played our part — see the following.]
You are the proprietor(s) of a website called The Modern Talking. We are the proprietors of a website called The Last Word on Nothing (LWON). The Modern Talking lists 22 posts under the tab, Science. Of those, 20 were originally published on LWON, either the day before or that same day.
The 20 science posts on The Modern Talking are published under the byline, Ajesh Joy. No link or credit lets the reader know that the posts were written, not by Ajesh Joy, but by the various People of LWON.
The People of LWON think that The Modern Talking is poopyheads and we don’t like you one bit. We don’t like you even if y’all are bots and not real people.
You never asked our permission to publish our works, we certainly never granted it, and we each own the copyright on our own posts. It says so right at the bottom:
Copyright © 2017 All Rights Reserved.
The writing on this blog belongs to the person who wrote it and should not be re-published without explicit permission of the author. Thank you!
So you’re infringing on our copyright and we’re science writers, so we can read the law and find lawyers and sue you for damages. Which we’d like to do, because we make no money on LWON and, if you have to pay us damages, then we can pay the hosting service and the tech guy.
Here’s what we want: We want you to stop swiping our work and we want you to stop immediately. Right now this minute. And don’t start up again either. Never publish our work without our permission again so long as you live. Assuming you’re alive.
Also, don’t steal anyone else’s work either. Stealing is very bad manners.
We also want you to remove from your website all the posts you swiped from us.
Now go away. Git. Stay away from The Last Word on Nothing. And cripes, you guys don’t even Google: type “The Modern Talking” and the first 5 pages are some German pop group.
It seems to have been taken down. Well fought!
Correlation not being causation, we can’t rightly claim credit. But we’re extremely proud of ourselves anyway.
There are so many excellent examples of writing in the letter itself, but the absolute coup de grace has to be referring to these slimbuckets as poopyheads. Well played.