What Do You Call Reverse Plagiarism?
There has been a considerable online furor recently over a magazine, Cooks Source, that is apparently in the habit of publishing material lifted from the internet, sometimes without credit, sometimes with credit but without permission. The controversy started when Monica Gaudio, the author of an SCA article on medieval apple pie, discovered that an edited version of her article had appeared, with her name but without her permission, in Cooks Source. She complained to the editor and got back an extraordinarily snarky email informing her that everything on the Internet is public domain—which is, of course, not true—and that she ought to be grateful for the editor's effort improving her article.
As the story spread, a considerable number of people spent time and effort going over back issues of Cooks Source to identify the sources of its material; there is now a Google docs spreadsheet up that provides a list of stolen articles. So far as I can tell, they didn't steal any of my medieval recipes; perhaps I should feel insulted.
The story raises an interesting terminological, and legal, question. Publishing something I wrote over someone else's name is plagiarism. What about publishing something I didn't write over my name? Monica's article was published over her name but had been edited without her permission, so some of what was published was not what she had written.
Putting aside the fact that publishing it without her permission, with or without credit, was a copyright violation, what was the legal status of attributing to her words she had not written?