He copies the documents, using the proper tools (navigator, OCR scanner, whatever...), messes them with his dirty colors and style, sign them and claim copyright on them.
After several public arguments on fr.rec.tv.series, he agreed to credit the genuine author for some of the documents he had stolen, but he goes on distributing them althought some of them have explicitely ask him to remove them.
This is what he stole so far :
| Original | Plagiarism or counterfeit |
|---|---|
| URL en séries on http://www.mygale.org/~webkiko/ues/listesvf/avf.html by Kiko. | Annulaire des sites francophones consacré aux séries TV (sic) on http://www.mygale.org/~tvseries/liens.html. His version is older than ours, but you recognise the formating. He signs "liens rassemblés par Johnny T", althought all these links have of course been gathered by Kiko. |
| L'Épisothèque on http://mapage.noos.fr/grilletv/episotheque/liste.html. | http://www.mygale.org/~tvseries/episodes/episodes.html. Most of the lists present there come from the Épisothèque. We can be positive because we noticed he also copied our bugs. However, the introducery text on the top of the page comes directly from our page. He just replace "nous" ("we") by "je" ("I"). |
| Papers from Christophe Petit and Martin Winckler about The Prisoner. | http://www.mygale.org/~tvseries/prisoner/prisoner.htm. These documents are the reproduction from books. Christophe Petit, author and editor of several of them asked him explicitely to remove them, but Johnny Tramontin insist on keeping them here. |
| Papers from Christophe Petit about The Invaders. | http://www.mygale.org/~tvseries/invader/invader.htm. These documents are the reproduction from Génération séries. Christophe Petit, author and editor of this magazine asked him explicitely to remove them, but Johnny Tramontin insist on keeping them here. |
| Papers from Christophe Petit about The Untouchables and Claude Mesplède and Lucille Rodier's episode guides. | http://www.mygale.org/~tvseries/untouch/untouch.htm. These documents are reproduction from Génération séries. Christophe Petit, author and editor this magazine asked him explicitely to remove them, but Johnny Tramontin insist on keeping them here. The episode guides have been written by Claude Mesplède et Lucille Rodier who have make them available on my site (detailed version). Johnny Tramontin copied them from there to his site without any credits, and keeps them there even after I asked him to remove them. |
This one happened long time ago, but I recently discovered that Ma£ter is back. I'll update the story as soon as possible.
On 17th January 1997, at approximately 09:00 GMT, while navigating on Internet, we found a "mirror" of our Prisoner site (which was then located at http://lolita.laas.fr:80/~salles/prisoner_v2.html). Taking a second look, it appeared that our names and those of the other contributors had been removed from the Credit section. Some paragraphs written in French had been removed, and the formatting had been changed. We were of course quite upset with this plagiarism.
While navigating further in the same site (they call themselves Master, and will be refered as Mas£er out of respect for genuine Internet webmasters), we found the same kind of misappropriation of other TV shows related pages. In most of the cases, the name of the genuine author of the page had been replaced by "Master", the other credits are removed, the formating is slightly damaged, and some pictures usually are missing.
The swindler was at the site http://www.getsurfed.co.uk/master/. The stolen pages are where the URL: http://www.getsurfed.co.uk/master/page3.htm. There was no mention of the facts that these pages had been copied from Internet. They where located in this site in order to promote (apparently unofficial) sale of videotapes by its Mas£er who's address was themaster@getsurfed.co.uk.
From their credit page, the real people behind this forgery where George Murphy, Andrew Hemingway and Steve Davis, and they even have the nerves to indicate: "Copyright Master Production 1996"
As their page was called "The Cult TV News anrd Gossip page", we enphasize the fact that this complaint you are reading now is not a gossip, but the actual and cruel truth.
This page was the first action we took. We of course asked Mas£er to remove our page from his site. We also notified this plagiarism to the other victims.
In the meantime, James Dawe, the author of The Avengers page complained directly to the network administrator of Mas£er (why didn't we think of that first?), and that resulted in the closing of the site at approximately 18:00 (GMT).
The following pages and series where concerned: