Who Could Blame Her, Really?

Those of you familiar with MySpace have probably received one of those messages saying your profile picture has been used on some other site. Hopefully you didn’t go clicking on the site because they are almost all scams to spam the heck out of you.

So I didn’t really blink the other day when one of my MySpace friends sent along a message that some of my pictures had shown up somewhere else, except that this message was a little different.

For one thing, it was personal, like she actually typed it. For another thing, the site my pictures had supposedly shown up on was a well-known and highly regarded message board.

Hmm. So I did, indeed, check it out.

Sure enough, some $!#*!! had posted MY pictures of MY work saying that SHE had done the nails!

The thread was about showing your artistic flair. The author started it trying to get everyone involved so they would all post some pix of their work and everyone could oooh and ahhh appropriately. We do that all the time on message boards. The thread got going pretty well too — it was all the way up to page 24 before this person posted my work as her own with the caption “just some nails I did last night.”

Wow. Really?

So while I am trying to register to post on this particular forum (hey, it’s a great forum, but I can only keep up with so many websites ya know?) so I can post a reply, the BF comes up and asks me what I’m doing. I explain to him that I am trying to post a reply to this girl who has blatantly stolen my work and says — all calm and annoying-like — “How do you know those are your pictures?”

WHHHAAAAAAAT?! How do I know those are MY pictures? Yeah, he wants to know how I know those are actually MY pictures of MY work on MY clients and not a case of someone re-creating my work on her own clients.

Um, I don’t know, how can mothers tell THEIR babies apart from anyone else’s?

Look, I took those photos. I know those photos. I know the people those photos are of. I did THOSE nails, not nails just like that.

But that’s not the best part! She actually posted afterwards that SHE “is Maggie.” Wow! Let me tell you, it’s one thing to have someone plagiarize your work, it’s quite another to have someone claim to be YOU. I’ve been feeling a little “Single White Female” since this went down yesterday. I have no idea how far this is going to go. Hopefully she’ll realize that a few people out there in Nail Tech Land actually KNOW me and she’ll back off and slink away.

But I mean, can I really blame her? After all, who wouldn’t want to be ME? I am pretty cool.