State of the Plagiarism

Isn’t it enough that you people set out to destroy her career and almost caused her death?

In case you don’t know, which I know for a fact you have been told, Cassie Edwards suffered a massive stroke due to the stress you idiots put on her. 

I hope you can live with yourselves knowing what you did almost cost this woman her life.  You have deprived her grandchildren of their grandmother.  You have caused a lot of innocent people much heartache by your actions.

Everyone is blaming you and your cronies for what happened. Not just her fans, fan club members, etc.  I’m talking publishers, authors, editors, and more.  I hope almost killing someone was worth the 15 minutes of fame.

If you have any reason to think this is a lie, contact Carol Stacy at Romantic Times and I’m sure she’ll verify the information for you.

A lot of Cassie’s fans plan on being at the RT convention in Orlando just so they can attend your blogging seminar.  Instead of it being about the art of blogging maybe it should be about the art of how to destroy a person’s life.

A few weeks ago, when Sarah realized that January 2009 would mark a year since the plagiarism scandal that rocked the ferret world, as well as the romance world, she asked Jane to examine the issue and do a “State of Plagiarism” analysis, so to speak. After much back and forth dialogue, we’ve come to the following conclusions about the way the issue of plagiarism is treated by our community. This entry is posted on both Dear Author and on Smart Bitches as a summary of our conversation.

 

On the positive side: the issue is being discussed, in the romance community, and in the larger publishing world as well. Fans, authors, and even publishers are being educated as to what plagiarism is, what enforcement mechanisms there are, and why it’s important for the entirety of the literary community to not be complacent or unsupportive.  Even if some, or even much, of the discussion is about how horribly mean we were to speak up and speak in the manner that we did, it was dialogue about an important topic that we hadn’t had before. 

The Edwards scandal was important not because of who was involved, but because it led to the further education. There was a session at RWA and one at RT.  There were mentions in the newspapers and on blogs.  There was support for the victim of plagiarism in a way that there wasn’t ten years prior, making it easier for one who is plagiarised to come forward. Plagiarism became newsworthy, and the increased attention meant that victims of prior incidents had room to speak up and share their stories, the costs both financial and emotional they endured to protect their copyright.

Even the absence of discussion was noticeable.

But the negatives are related to the positives: the session at RWA was poorly attended, and there was a backlash to those who spoke out, not so much here at Smart Bitches or Dear Author, but against others who took a stand. With the revelation of plagiarism at the hand of Neale Donald Walsch, the same old themes are played out with a full orchestra.

Those who raise the issue and cry foul, whether it’s a blogger or the writer herself, take the blame. We’re told to hush up, keep quiet, and stop being mean.

It was one year ago this week that we broke the Cassie Edwards story.  This entry isn’t in the least about her. Instead, it’s about where the writing community stands in regard to plagiarism within the genre. Based on our analysis, we haven’t made much progress. Lip service is paid to the idea that its bad, but when the excrement hits the air circulating device, there’s navel gazing and thumb twiddling and fretting and calls for forgiveness, bygones, and stop being mean already.

Little has changed in attitude and practice. Plagiarism remains an issue tried in the court of public opinion, and the more famous or published the thief is, the more likely they are to be reassured and forgiven by their eager fanbase.  Plagiarism is not an issue that can always be validated in a court case; it’s a community issue. Do we, as a community, believe in the need for intellectual honesty and creativity?

Why is there not more of a reaction to sympathize with the person whose work, inspiration, and words were stolen from them? Why is there instead pressure for the victim to shut up about it and a general attitude that the whole mess should just disappear so people can get back to reading?

In our opinion, plagiarism isn’t taken seriously enough by some readers or by some writers. The defense of the plagiarist and the ease with which forgiveness is offered by readers is so stupid as to be mindboggling. What, because they cried and said they were sorry it should be over? Remorse is enough? To quote the wizened literary scholar Rhianna: “You’re only sorry you got caught.”

Until every reader and every writer refuses to tolerate plagiarism and the thieves that commit it, it will be a problem that continues to grow. But that intolerance needs to extend to every genre. When plagiarism hit romance, the response was, “Oh, but it’s only romance novels, and they’re all the same anyway.” With the spiritual writing community, the response is, “Oh, it’s just crazy religious people who think they talk to God, so whatever.” With fanfic, it’s “Oh, it’s just fanfic.”

Plagiarism should not be tolerated anywhere by anyone, and that includes romance, spiritual writing, literary fiction, academic publication, and fanfic. It shouldn’t be tolerated, it shouldn’t be excused, and it shouldn’t be something that is kept quiet. The lack of support for those who suffer from it is appalling: from insane court costs to accusations of being a whiner, the person who has been robbed is singled out as a troublemaker who ought to pipe down. From warnings of bad publicity to being called an outright liar, the victim is again a victim.

Yet again plagiarism shows up in the news this week, and yet again the same song is played. Everyone should be vocal in making a stand and making plagiarism unacceptable within our community. The song needs to change.

Comments are Closed

  1. ehren says:

    Plagiarism shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone, but leave the fanfiction alone. No one makes money off those and if they are they ARE breaking the law. If you’re just writing it and putting it on the internet you make no money off of it and therefore it doesn’t matter. The problem here is that REAL plagiarists make money off of another’s work. THAT is the problem. Not some kid writing a story using another’s characters, a first attempt at writing something, who is doing it just for fun.

    I know what you are talking about, but leave fanfiction alone. I myself am a fanfiction writer and its my way of getting ideas out of my head. If things went the way ya’ll write in this article I would be arrested for simply having a say in what I write about. I make no money off of what I do and I entertain a lot of people. I also perfect my writing through this. Does this make me a bad person because I borrow another’s characters for these purposes alone? No, not really. After all, I’m not making any money with it and not depriving a creator’s right to claim the characters I borrow.

    The issue is a black and white issue when a person is making a profit from the endeavor. It turns gray when they’re not.

  2. snarkhunter says:

    What is also an interesting side note is that plagiarism is mostly an issue for Westerners. In other cultures, wholesale quoting without attribution is accepted and considered a method of honoring other authors. The belief on the writer’s part is that the reader is familiar with the source materials and doesn’t need any attribution. Our sense of individualism and authorial ownership is very unique to our academic and publishing culture.

    I’m glad someone mentioned this. I didn’t bring it up, b/c it seemed like a whole other can of worms with potential for wank, but it can be a problem, especially for international students from some Asian cultures at Western universities. If they’re not totally familiar with Western requirements, they can find themselves accidentally plagiarizing. I used to work with international graduate students, and have given presentations on the problem of grad student plagiarism, and that’s one major issue there.

  3. mary says:

    Ehren, I’m not going to attack or defend fan fiction here—not my ox being gored—but I don’t think anyone on this thread was attacking fan fiction per se. But what makes fan fiction “not plagiarism” (in my opinion) is the fan writers’ willingness—even eagerness, I gather—to acknowledge their source material and give credit to the original authors. Plagiarism is the presentation of someone else’s words or ideas as one’s own—fan fiction doesn’t do that. Does it?

    This is not to say that fan fiction writers can’t be plagiarists—some obviously are, or have become, plagiarists. Nor does it touch on whether or not fan fiction constitutes copyright infringement or another kind of theft of intellectual property—that’s a different discussion. But that fan fiction writers don’t make money off of their writing is meaningless to the question of whether or not a particular piece of fan writing has been plagiarized . . . or not. In other words, we’ve got separate issues here, and it might be a good idea to keep them separated.

  4. Holly says:

    Ehren:  I agree with you, although I’m conflicted about when authors have specifically asked that fans not do any fic.  I am itching to write a Black Dagger Brotherhood (yes, I’m a crahck addict) fic.  I know JR Whard doesn’t like them, but I would never’ve been moved to do it if not for the Caspar fiasco.  I have a MUCH better idea for V’s mate.  Will never write it, but it would rock if I did.  You feel me?

  5. Bitsy says:

    Who are these other authors? Were they romance writers or even in a genre likely to be read by CE readers.

    Apparently, it’s not wrong to steal if you didn’t expect to get caught. The things I’ve missed by not going to Edinburgh….

  6. West says:

    Who are these other authors? Were they romance writers or even in a genre likely to be read by CE readers.

    Oh, I see I was wrong. Apparently, it’s only plagiarism if it’s in the same genre! My gods, how could I have been so stupid? *Hangs head in shame*

    Okay, sarcam off.

    It doesn’t effing matter if the other authors wrote romance, or were likely to be read by CE fans. They are writers she stole from. And though it really, really irritates me to repeat myself, here goes… say it with me this time- plagiarism is stealing, stealing is wrong.

    Come on, once more with feeling- PLAGIARISM IS STEALING, STEALING IS WRONG!

    Do we freaking get that yet?

  7. Chrissy says:

    *pop*  /can of worms opened

    Thing is, few people want to say it, but the quality of CE’s readership is an issue.  Sorry, it is.  She will always sell books and have rabid defenders.  But the kind of person who sucks up page after page of horribly written racist crap isn’t exactly likely to set the bar high when it comes to issues of intellectual property.

    Sorry if you are or were a fan, but her books are an abomination.  They are racist before you even open the craptastically appropriative covers smeared with garish, bad clinches and titles inevitably SAVAGE in nature.

    Of COURSE they can’t wrap their heads around wrong-doing on CE’s part.  They read her books and thought they were brilliant. 

    Flame away, but it’s true.  /can of worms closed… err… prolly not, though

  8. Lori says:

    I am itching to write a Black Dagger Brotherhood (yes, I’m a crahck addict) fic.  I know JR Whard doesn’t like them, but I would never’ve been moved to do it if not for the Caspar fiasco.  I have a MUCH better idea for V’s mate.  Will never write it, but it would rock if I did.  You feel me?

    Holly, fic is only an issue when it hits the wide open internet.  If you’re dying to write something you should do it and just share it in a really, really limited way.  You get your story out & it isn’t an issue for JR Ward because it’s not floating around out in the world.

    I say that as a sort of frustrated writer who is all in favor of people getting their stories down on the page even if I can’t seem to 🙂

  9. Holly says:

    Chrissy: Oh no you didn’t!  Snap!

    (My daughter has started saying Snap!  She clearly doesn’t understand the necessary context for it, but it’s really cute.  I need to be more careful about watching My Name Is Earl when she’s in the room.)

  10. hydecat says:

    Smart Bitches, you don’t deserve any hate for blowing the whistle on Cassie Edwards. Plagiarism is a serious issue, and responsible readers should take it seriously.

    I’m incorporating Cassie Edwards, and parts of your PDF on the subject, into my class discussions of plagiarism this semester to show my students that it is a *real* problem that happens to *real* people.

  11. Randi says:

    Ehren: It sounds, to me, like you’re getting plagerism and copyright infringement conflated. As Ann S. said up-thread, that happens a lot.

    As long as you have the creator’s permission, you can fanfic all you want; as long as you aren’t receiving some compensation for it. If you posted a story, verbatim, that someone else wrote, that’s plagerism. I think you have the technicalities right, in your head, if not the verbage.

    By the by, it didn’t appear to me that anyone jumped on the “hating fanfic authors” wagon (not being a fanfic author I may have overlooked that particular can of worms). However, if someone had, what makes fanfic the special snowflake exception to plagerism?

  12. Chrissy says:

    Just a couple of cents on fanfic… many authors have mixed emotions because

    1.  it’s a tribute that acknowledges the source material by its very nature
    BUT
    2.  they can open a can of worms with allegations of “you stole from me (fan)” if they are doing series work

    I know what I have read from both Terry Pratchett and even JK Rowling on the subject has left me without a real solid answer.  There have been some pretty heated and worthwhile discussions on various sff boards.  I just don’t know that I’ve seen an argument that convinced me definitely either way.

  13. Randi says:

    As I see it, fanfic is up to the creator. I haven’t seen any arguements that convince me that people are *entitled* to write about another’s creation, without permission.

    Either the creator gives their permission, in which case, off you go! Or the creator does not, in which case, go write about something else. This doesn’t seem like a horribly complicated issue. Am I missing something?

  14. KCfla says:

    Having followed this discussion, and all of last year’s revelations I can only add my agreements to the *NO!* that is plagiarism. My Alma Mater would have booted my arse to the street had I done anything like that- NO SECOND CHANCES!
    ************
    And just an FYI- because I’m one of those that gets thoroughly ticked off seeing her books still on the racks at stores, I went to the Dorchester website. Searched for CE, and…
    64 books/audios listed.
    11 in stock- most of which were either audios ( therefore more expensive) or 1/2 price. Maybe clearing out the backstock?
    (I can dream can’t I???)

    I also didn’t see any listed as “upcoming”, but I could have missed that. 
    Did anyone ( Sarah? Candy? Ja(y)nes et. al.??) ever hear from Dorchester? Or was it just Signet that * manned up* as it were?

  15. Ehren says:

    Holly: yeah I know. Anne Rice is still a douche, though.

    Lori: fanfiction really IS the sincerist form of flattery, because fans want to see where things would go should they have been done another way. That’s the point of fanfiction. When you get someone to regulate the internet like what the Smart Bitches want or the way you are wanting actually you would also be allowing these regulators to ruin the fun for EVERYONE. The internet is free to use. Keep it that way. I don’t care if you personally don’t like fanfiction the point still stands that fans should be allowed to do it and not claim it as their own, which, from my own experience, NO ONE CLAIMS IT AS THEIR OWN. THEY ALSO MAKE NO MONEY.

  16. snarkhunter says:

    When you get someone to regulate the internet like what the Smart Bitches want

    What? Where in the world did they say that?

  17. Ehren says:

    Chrissy: I know Ive had people come to me saying someone must’ve stolen my idea. I have one comic I’ve been doing for shits and giggles since about 2005 called The Adventures of Mini Erik and it’s about my phantom of the opera doll coming to life and then other dolls come to life after ward. This is the one I typically get people telling me someone stole my work, which is hilarious to me that they even report about that particular thing. I don’t own it therefore I have no claim and neither do they. Besides, typically I write better and draw better than they do.

    The little shits who get uppity over their own fanfiction idea getting stolen are just immature little idiots, honestly. Other than them I don’t often see someone taking another’s fanfiction and claiming the idea as their own and I’m hip deep in the fanfiction world.

    And as I said to someone else, I’m all for following the wishes of the author. If JK Rowling said fanfiction of Harry Potter was banned from ff.net then I would throw a royal fit and then leave fanfiction.net. That isn’t to say I’d hate her for it, just that I’d throw a fit because I do a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction, albeit in a round about way, and that sort of puts a kink in where I can post things to entertain people again. I’d still respect her wishes and not post it up on ff.net, which is where most frequent. If Hiromu Arakawa said no to fanfiction, which I highly doubt because she’s as much into watching how other people do her characters as I am, I’d respect her wishes and try to find someplace else to carry the work I do.

    There is already a lot of shit piled on fanartists in communities such as Elfwood and other big artist sites, excluding deviantart, because the arrogant masses sneer at fanartists for being “unoriginal”.

  18. Ehren says:

    Plagiarism should not be tolerated anywhere by anyone, and that includes romance, spiritual writing, literary fiction, academic publication, and fanfic.

  19. Suze says:

    When you get someone to regulate the internet like what the Smart Bitches want or the way you are wanting actually you would also be allowing these regulators to ruin the fun for EVERYONE.

    Huh? Wha?  How did regulating the internet get into this discussion?

    The Smart Bitches don’t want to regulate the internet.  They, we want professional authors who are plagiarists to not plagiarize.  To lose their publishing contracts.  To have some damned consequences to their thievery.

    Nobody is saying “no more fanfic”.  We’re saying “don’t say you wrote something that you didn’t write”.

  20. mary says:

    Ehren, unless you believe that fanfic is itself by definition ALSO plagiarism, then your clip from the original post doesn’t really make much sense to me. Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s words or, yes, ideas, as if they were one’s own, original work—period. Harry Potter fanfic writers do not claim (I believe) to have created Harry Potter or Rowling’s world, do they?

    Saying that “plagiarism should not be tolerated anywhere” doesn’t mean “the internet should be regulated.” It means that plagiarism should not be tolerated. If you choose to tolerate plagiarism of your own work, that is your decision . . . but you really have no right to make that call for other writers or readers (of fan fiction or otherwise), in my opinion.

  21. Lori says:

    Ehren, I have no idea how I got involved in your thing about fanfic.  My note to Holly was based on the fact that she wants to write a story in the world of an author who has asked her fans not to publish fic and Holly indicated that she intended to respect JR Ward’s wishes.  I made no general statements about fanfic at all.

  22. Lynn says:

    Morgana:

    I don’t care where you went to school or what degrees you were granted.  I don’t even care if you have some basic candlepower.  If you’re smart enough to understand the principles that make plagiarism rather a big deal but don’t care anyway, you’re just low-rent.  You may have been granted higher degrees, but if really basic academic, intellectual, and creative ethics are beyond you, you probably didn’t deserve them.

    Then again, as your argument seems to boil down to “your all just jelus,” I’m still banking on troll.

  23. Chrissy says:

    Having had some of my work (not fiction, images) stolen in the past, I agree about author agreement.  🙂

    But I also saw how rabid, nasty, and unethical the thieves become when they are called on it.  I was cyber-stalked and harassed for YEARS over turning people in and that was AFTER I’d been polite in asking them to comply.

    Guilt is a very showy thing, turns out.

    One word on education: my pedigree is impeccable in that regard.  Having been to the best schools does not mean anyone has the high moral ground staked out.

    And colleges and universities boot students for plagiarism all the time.  It only makes the news if there was a publishing contract involved.  Seriously, there would be no space for anything else if they covered every expulsion for plagiarism.  It IS taken seriously.

  24. snarkhunter says:

    Plagiarism should not be tolerated anywhere by anyone, and that includes romance, spiritual writing, literary fiction, academic publication, and fanfic.

    O_o

    To quote Anne Rice (God help me), “you’re interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.” That doesn’t say that fanfic is plagiarism, any more than it says that romance, spiritual writing, literary fiction, or academic publication is plagiarism.

    What is says is that plagiarism in ANY OF THOSE AREAS OF CREATIVE PRODUCTION, from something as relatively esteemed as lit fic or academic writing to something as relatively unappreciated/denigrated as romance and fic, is unacceptable.

    In other words, a person who plagiarizes someone else’s fanfiction story is just as bad as someone who plagiarizes someone else’s academic paper.

    There’s no problem here.

  25. Coming in very late, having been pointed here from the wilds of LiveJournal:

    The Kaavya Viswanathan case is very strange indeed, and no reportage or commentary I’ve read has picked up on what I consider the oddest parts.  It’s clear that she was indeed echoing text from other works—but the Wikipedia entry omits what I consider a key detail: Ms. Viswanathan was reported to possess a photographic or eidetic memory.  My suspicion is that as an avid reader, she’d internalized a lot of the fiction she’d read—and as a writer and college freshman with a crowded schedule and a deadline, she unconsciously allowed fragments of those internalized books to mingle with the book she was writing.  This kind of not-quite-verbatim recasting is a common and natural beginning-writer phenomenon, and it would only be exacerbated by someone’s having an eidetic memory.  [Does that excuse the borrowing?  Not at all, but it may explain it.]

    The really peculiar thing about the KaavyaGate case, though, is that the packager’s involvement made no business sense based on the available facts.  I posted a comment on the case at the time; the problem with the story as reported is that it requires the packager to have done an enormous amount of editorial and development work entirely on spec—yet packagers virtually never work on spec (and I know writers who’d worked for prior incarnations of that particular packager).  Whatever Kaavya Viswanathan’s literary sins may have been, there was some very weird publishing industry business practice going on in that sequence of events that’s never been adequately explained.

  26. AgTigress says:

    John Bunnell, thank you for that link to your blog about the Viswanathan case.  Really fascinating stuff.  The case didn’t get all that much coverage in the UK at the time, so I knew little about it, but all the background about ‘packaging’ firms and college consultants and the like made my jaw drop!  The overall impression certainly looks like a bright teenager being cynically manipulated left, right and centre.
    In this, it seems to be markedly different from the Cassie Edwards business, which involves a very well-established, experienced and successful author, who was wholly responsible for her own writing process.

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