If Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery, What's Plagiarism?

This pic was taken in my dining room. Want to use it? Ask me first!

My rum article that was published in Robb Report a few weeks ago got a lot of positive response from rum experts who know more than I about the category, and whose approval means a lot to me. It also got a lot of snarky comments from some other rum experts, most of whom are in Europe, and who astutely called me out for going light on rums that never came out in the States and disappeared before 2010. What can I say, I tried to write about rum that’s available to purchase and that I’ve actually, you know, tasted.

My friend (we’ve never met in person, but that doesn’t seem like a prerequisite for friendship nowadays) Maura Gedid, of Holmes Cay rum fame, forwarded me a couple of the most noteworthy responses to the article. The first came from the American Rum Report newsletter, which I was previously unaware of, but it’s a terrific resource for rum nerds who are interested in Stateside developments in the category. They reviewed my round-up and said some extremely kind things about it, including this (and please bear with me, blowing my own horn isn’t something I normally do, but I love it so much that I can’t help myself):

If you're used to reading the various rum-related listicles that get churned out on a weekly basis, it only takes a couple sentences for you to realize that Sachs wrote something that's probably too good to have a descriptor as annoying as "listicle" attached to it.

That means a hell of a lot to a guy who writes his share of listicles, believe me.

The other thing Maura sent me was my rum article — well, the first half of it, as mine was the 21 best rums of the 21st century (so far), and this was a top ten list — beautifully and faithfully translated into French and published by Luxe.net, an online mag that looked like France’s equivalent of Robb Report. I’d never seen my work reprinted in a foreign language! According to Luxe.net, however, it wasn’t MY work but the work of someone I’d never heard of.

Warning: a tangent is coming that relates to the subject at hand.

One of the only proper desk jobs I’ve ever had was as a proofreader for a language translation company. I had to check translated documents against the originals to make sure the translations were correct. Only problem was, apart from English and a little Spanish, I didn’t know any of the languages I was looking at — and in the case of languages like Chinese or Arabic, I couldn’t even read them. But there are tricks one can learn to check two documents against each other and make sure they say pretty much the same thing. It was a cool skill to acquire, and the job itself was pretty fun, though booze writing has far better perks.

But my point is, I used my document translation skills and realized pretty quickly that this was a word-for-word ripoff — a plagiarism, if you will — of my writing. And the kicker? They used the same photos I used in Robb Report… one of which was taken by me, in my apartment. And you guessed it, I didn’t get credited for that either.

I’ve been plagiarized before, but it’s always been by bloggers, and it’s always been sentences or paragraphs, not full articles running in the thousands of words. This was the most upscale and blatant plagiarism I’d yet experienced. And I admit it, I was a little flattered. I mean, nobody would plagiarize crap writing, would they?

I wasn’t so flattered that I was about to let Luxe.net get away with it. I quickly alerted my editor at Robb Report, who assured me that their legal team would be in touch in the morning (it was the middle of the night in France). In the meantime, I looked up the “author” on social media and found her on Facebook. I messaged her: “Hi! Do you write for Luxe.net?”

When I woke up the next morning, I saw she’d responded: “Yes,” with a smiley face emoji. “You come about the article?” Below it: “Do you Want us to put your Name at the end of the article?”

I wrote, “If it was just me, I’d want my name at the top of the article, saying I wrote it and you translated it. And I’d want to get paid for it. But Robb Report’s legal team will probably make you delete it. They’re aware of it.” Then I added, “And really, you shouldn’t do things like that! It’s illegal and dishonorable.” I couldn’t let her get off without a good, if brief, scolding.

Five minutes later, she replied that the article had been deleted. I was thinking of asking her why she did it, but in the end I just typed “Great, thank you,” and let her be. If you think I should reveal her name here, let me know in the Comments section!