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| CERN Wife in Ferney-Voltaire apartment, April 2012 |
Curiosity poked me: where is “CERN
Wife” in Google’s search engine? I
checked, and there it was, on the very top of the first page. But what is THAT? Below the listing of my blog is www.lifeasacernwife.blogspot.com. Life as a CERN wife? Couldn’t whoever this is have thought
of something other than CERN Wife?
That’s MY blog name! And
she uses it on blogspot, no less.
I clicked on this usurper’s URL and
found the title of her blog: “A Year in France: Life as a CERN Wife”. This is not quite plagiarism, but my
blood pressure rose to the top of my head because my original blog title was
“CERN Wife: Spending a Year in Ferney-Voltaire” – the town in France where we
lived. My first blog post was February 1, 2012. Hers was September 3, 2012, less than two months after we had returned to the U.S. from France.
Her blog set-up is similar to mine
as well. Although fonts and template
design are there on blogspot for the choosing, she selected the same font for
her text, but a lighter color than the one I’m using, and her photographs,
centered in the middle, like mine, are outlined in grey rather than black. I don’t have a photo on the top of my
blog. She has one – a scene of
undulating hills in autumn, which I suppose was taken in the nearby Jura
Mountains. This blogger’s content,
as a young wife and new mother, is different from mine – so in reality she
didn’t plagiarize, but still…
One can’t copyright a title, whether
naming a book, blog, or business. The rational me has convinced the
creative me that there is no reason to be perturbed that someone has
appropriated my blog title. I
suppose I should be flattered that I am an original, and she (in all likelihood
intelligent and pleasant) is derivative.
