Plagiarism

There's been a lot of talk on the social networks about plagiarism today. It all started with a Cook Source Magazine article that was written by someone not associated with Cook Source and not paid for their work. Emails were exchanged between the writer of the article and the magazine. The email from the writer is an angry email, as it should be, and Cook Source's reply is even worse.
There are a few things very wrong with the reply. The first thing being that the internet is public domain. It's not. Anything I post on the internet is mine. Anything you post is yours. That's how it works.
The next bit goes on to talk about how this sort of thing happens all the time. And it does. It's called citations. As long as I give credit where credit is due, I am doing the right thing. Granted, the article writer's name was credited for the article, but she was unaware that her article was even going to be used.
This leads us to the third terrible thing. The reply tells the author that she is lucky to have had her poor work edited at no charge. Now forgive me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that if I write an article and I edit it to the best of my ability, I can then sell it to some interested party. This interested party will not ask me to pay for the edits they've made. And regardless of my editing abilities, I will not be charged for the editing that is performed after the work has left my hands. They're paying me for the story, the subject matter and the voice that I write in, not my grammatical perfection or spelling wizardry.
I would be flattered, honored, probably even cry from joy if a magazine or some other source wanted to use anything that I've written, and I would even be honored to do this for free. I would also want to know that my work was being published. This to me was the worst thing that Cook Source did to the article writer. She had no idea.


Anyway, that's just my thoughts on plagiarism. I hope that my work makes it somewhere that people will see it, someday. As for now, I'll keep an eye out for pieces of mine that I don't know are out there.