You met Alex in your speech communication class and formed a fast friendship when you realized that you both were from New Orleans. You are listening to Alex deliver a speech about growing up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His speech is compelling, and you are enthralled by his detailed account of how his parish changed in the years after that devastating storm. Having gone through many of the same experiences, you find yourself nodding in agreement with much of what he says. But when he closes with a passage about the lessons the storm taught him—from keeping up his car insurance to counting his blessings—it seems eerily familiar. In fact, it’s an almost verbatim copy of a status update you posted to your own Facebook page on Thanksgiving Day, the semester before you met Alex. When you get back to your dorm room and pull up your Facebook history, you realize that a mutual friend, Elliot, had been moved by your post and reposted it to his own page. Alex must have seen it there, because he used it almost wholesale, changing only minor details, like the names of your family and your elementary school.
You are angry—on many levels. You poured your heart into that post, and although it was only about a hundred words, it took you a good deal of time to write and rewrite until it captured exactly how you were feeling. Now you feel like someone has stolen not only your work but your feelings as well. Even worse, you saw that the class was moved by Alex’s—your—conclusion, and you’re certain he’s going to get a good grade based at least in part on something you wrote. And because your privacy settings are pretty tight, the passage won’t come up on a standard Web search so you know it’s unlikely that he’ll get caught unless you say something. What do you do?