This is a website about Kevin Leam, aka 'Sarc' or 'Lunacy Phrynge', a serial plagiarist, habitual liar, and total prick.
(Google suggests there is only one Kevin Leam in the world, but in the event of there being more than one - in name at least, for in character there is surely only one such loathsome mutant freak in the world - the biographical data and pictures in
the original article will establish which one is being referred to.)
In April 2007 Michael Kelly, a net-based humorist, author of the 'Ulrich Haarburste' Orbison in Clingfilm stories and so on and a published writer, discovered that for the past four years Kevin Leam had been systematically plagiarising him and several other net writers in blogs on myspace and easyjournal: copying and pasting countless dozens of articles wholesale and claiming to have written them himself. Leam would link to this plagiarised writing from his profile on various dating sites, claiming they were his own works, in an attempt to impress girls. As a result of this he struck up more than one intimate correspondence with a woman who believed he was a skilled and prolific writer, and enjoyed a growing reputation as a wit on myspace. He also claimed to have done stand-up, appeared in a film and on television, and to be in a successful band, by the expedient of copying articles written by people who had actually done these things and inserting his own name in them. He is a sad and eminently laughable but completely vile individual.
Mr. Kelly placed an article detailing these thefts and lamenting Leam's vileness on his website. Via an intermediary he contacted Kevin Leam and requested that he delete the stolen articles, place an admission and apology on his blogs and pay a modest sum to charity to reflect the value of the stolen work. Information on his actions was circulated to those on his myspace friends list. Leam responded with abuse and denials, claiming variously that Mr. Kelly (presumably in collusion with the half dozen other writers and rock band he had also stolen from) had in fact copied his work, despite the fact that the evidence of the internet archive clearly showed this to be a lie; or, bizarrely, that Kelly was an editor who had asked Leam to write for him, and when he had declined to do so had hatched a complicated and far-flung conspiracy to discredit him out of pique.
Needless to say no-one above a certain IQ believed him. Due to the need to discourage this kind of activity and protect copyright on the internet, and the non-response of the web hosts in question to requests to delete the infringing material, Mr. Kelly felt unable to let the matter drop there. Thanks to the mediation of a despairing acquaintance of Leam's he was finally persuaded to at least remove the thefts from his myspace blog. However this was accompanied by further abuse of and lies about Mr. Kelly.
It was suggested to Mr. Kelly by people who knew Kevin Leam that he was more to be pitied than despised; that anyone who knew him at all would be unlikely to believe his claims to authorship or indeed much of anything else he said; that he had various problems, poor child. Despite testimony from other people who knew Leam that he was just scum, and the evidence that people who didn't know him were being completely taken in by him, Mr. Kelly was eventually worn down by this bleeding-heart nonsense. Partly out of misplaced pity, or at least a desire not to be thought needlessly vindictive towards a vanquished and possibly subhuman opponent, and partly out of extreme aesthetic revulsion and a desire never again to be reminded of the squalid and sleazy existence of Kevin Leam, and partly due to a reluctance to embark on costly, uncertain and time-wasting litigation, Mr. Kelly decided not to take further action against Leam for the time being, as unsatisfactory as this was. However he left the page detailing the plagiarisms on his website, both to warn people against Kevin Leam and in the hope that he would eventually see reason and make an admission, apology and settlement.
Mr. Kelly was mistaken. Even a cornered rat can bite; the scum mentality sees mercy as weakness; as the current state of British society should have showed him, when excuses are made for bad people, when they are indulged and coddled and pitied and protected from the consequences of their behaviour, nice people suffer. And as Mr Kelly's years as a ringer in the Over-60s Cage-Fighting League should have taught him, you should only stop stomping on your opponents when they are comatose, not when they squeal or whimper or wet themselves or their artificial limbs fall off.
Eighteen months later in February 2009 Mr. Kelly received a communication from the ridiculously-named company 'Orange', owners of his Freeserve website, informing him that a complaint had been received with regard to the webpage listing and proving Kevin Leam's thefts, and that unless this was deleted within three days Mr. Kelly's entire website would be removed. Bizarrely, they refused to say which specific material on the page was objected to or why; when pressed, they said the page had breached the Terms of Service, but declined to say which one. They stipulated that, for all they knew, the page might be both truthful and legal - which it is, as truth cannot be defamation, and the facts stated on the page were backed up with screenshots and links to independent sources - but have so far refused to investigate further.
Mr. Kelly withdrew the page in question before the deadline while attempting to reason with Orange-Freeserve. However he had put a note on the homepage describing the situation and mentioning the plagiarist Kevin Leam. This too was held to be in breach of the Terms of Service - again, Orange refused to say which one - and despite the fact that no notification or warning had been made of this, Mr. Kelly's entire website, 'Michael Kelly's Page of Misery' was deleted, and at the time of writing remains so. Although it is to be hoped that Orange can be made to see reason, as of now a website containing ten years' work, which has given pleasure to countless thousands of people worldwide and is quite important to the sales of Mr. Kelly's books, has been summarily erased overnight on the unverified word of an apparently pathological liar and living piece of shit. It is strange.
Now that he no longer has a website Mr. Kelly's natural inclination is to walk away from the net entirely. His occasional killing sprees aside, he is an essentially gentle man who wants contact only with beautiful and pleasing things. However, there seems a chance that the net may unfortunately soon be all there is, which means it cannot be abandoned to fuck-ups like Kevin Leam.
Therefore, linked below is a reproduction of Mr. Kelly's original article on Leam. All facts were correct as of April 2007. It is mirrored elsewhere. This will work like a hydra. If any attempt is made to censor the information on this blog, it will be duplicated on two new sites, and the same will apply to them. This is an automatic process manned by kindly volunteers and Mr. Kelly's pretty little head will not even be troubled by it.
Further down is an update on Kevin Leam's activities and below that some jokes Mr. Kelly has thought of. He will write more of them every time he is reminded of Leam's loathsome existence.
(Update: Mr. Kelly's new website is or will be
here - for the time being it remains a skeleton.)
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Click here to read the original article on Leam
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