During the early 1990s, writers had a decent chance of getting away with misappropriating information from Internet-distributed strategy guides.

I myself had at least two Internet strategy guides plagarized or used without attribution during that time.

In the first case, an almost word-for-word copy of my Command & Conquer strategy guide -- which itself was a distillation of comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategy posts used by permission-- got printed as a booklet, and featured as an "extra" that month for a tier-one newstand magazine. I found out about it from a fan 10,000 miles away on another continent who sent an e-mail to congratulate me on making the cover.

The editor and I agreed that I would be compensated standard rates for the material, and that he would deal appropriately with the irresponsible freelancer.

In the second, a staff writer from a tier-one gaming website copied data from another guide -- I don't remember if it was Red Alert or X-COM 3, but it was stuff that could only have come from my guide. In any case, I wrote the editor, who in turn had a word with the writer. The next day, those portions had proper credit given to the guide.

There was also the email I got from a guy who wanted me to produce a valid U.S. copyright registration within 30 days or else he was just going to steal my work and publish it on his own. *shakes head back and forth*

So, anyway. The mid-90s was the end of the "get material free on teh Intarnet"* era for publications that wanted to remain respectable. Even then, the Internet audience had grown too large to plagarize Internet-distributed material without someone noticing the similarity and raising a stink.

As the 1-up case shows, the chance of someone getting away with that today is near zero.

* - it's even becoming more difficult for college students to plagarize term papers verbatim, as more professors are asking students to register their term papers on similarity-checking websites.