Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Thought I’d see who this person was whose work got ripped off.  And he’s pretty dang impressive.

“Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939), or Ohiyesa (“victor”), was born to a Sioux father and a mixed-blood mother on a Santee Sioux reservation in Minnesota. According to the philosophy of the time, Eastman received his education among whites, attending preparatory school and then Dartmouth College, and later graduating from medical school. He became an agency physician for the Indian Health Service and worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where he cared for the wounded after the US Army’s 1890 attack on Lakota chief Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee. Eastman moved to Washington, DC, in the late 1890s and lobbied the government on behalf of the Santee Sioux. He then held a succession of government positions; President Roosevelt assigned him in 1903 to revise the allotment of tribal lands and to assign the Sioux family names to protect their land titles. Author of the autobiographical Indian Boyhood (1902), Eastman helped to found the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900/peopleevents/pandeAMEX38.html

OMG! Cassie Edwards caught ripping off the Boy Scouts of America!

Oh, that headline just is so shiny!

Forget the publishers. Let’s email Cassie. See what she has to say for herself.

Oh my. If you go to her website and simply google the new blurb about her Dreamcather series… the blurb is on ANOTHER website selling dreamcatchers… huh?

If you really want to reach those with the power at Penquin, try going through a sales rep. They get very little email and will pass the message on up the line. You’ll likely hear back.

I like the e-mailing Cassie Edwards idea, even though the chances of her admitting to being too lazy to put another person’s research in her own words is unlikely. 

I do have a question, though:  are all the books (SAVAGE LONGING, RUNNING FOX, etc.) with copies in them from the post-google age, and has anyone looked at books she wrote before the internet made all facts available all the time?  She must have some books from the early nineties….  I was just wondering if this is a recent phenomenon or not.

Stupid question, but has anyone even SEEN Cassie Edwards?  Does she exist?  And even if she does exist, what if she’s a front or a sockpuppet?  Maybe she’s a computer program that automatically generates romance writing from some kind of algorithm and randomly pulls content from the Web to supplement?

Sort of like the room full of monkeys on typewriters generating Shakespeare plays?

@monimala: Oh I love that idea. I just love it. Writing robots for the win!

Wait… is this the same Charles Eastman that the HBO special was based on? (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)

*Ahem*

I have in my possession a paperback copy of Eastman’s ‘Indian Boyhood’, with an intro by Frederick W. Turner III, U. of Mass, which states thusly:
———————————
INDIAN BOYHOOD

A Fawcett Premier Book

This book contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

Introduction copyright (c) 1972 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portions thereof in any form.

Printed in the United States of America
November 1972
——————-

Srsly, does it *have* to be any clearer?  So much for this source possibly being out of copyright. 

[verification: next23—yowzah.

R, hold on: that’s the copyright of the introduction, not the text. An introduction’s copyright has no influence on the copyright status of the body of the work.

I hope that in addition to sharing your email with their “Editorial, Publicity, Sales and Marketing departments” they also share it with their legal department.

Whoosh.  Then that bit about:

“All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portions thereof in any form.”

...was just impotent noise?

Damn.  Color me enlightened.

There’s an article on plagiarism in yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed.  It’s based on a meeting of the American Historical Association, and it focuses on academia, but this seems relevant:

Confronting—and Not Confronting—Plagiarism

however much plagiarism may offend scholars and make professors look silly to the public when famous authors are exposed, the law takes a different approach. “From the point of view of the law, defamation of character is a very live issue, but plagiarism is really marginal,” said Alan Lessoff, professor of history at Illinois State University and editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

If that’s so, it may explain why not everyone sees the problem.  Everyone knows about slander and libel, but perhaps there’s insufficient education on plagiarism because it’s often not pursued (legally, at least) and doesn’t crop up in the news often like accusations of defamation.

Anyone can put out an edition of Pride and Prejudice. But they cannot simply photocopy or scan the Penguin edition and sell that, because Penguin owns the formatting, typesetting, pagination, etc. *That* is what the book means by “no unauthorized copying”.

Just because the word “reserved” or “copyrighted” exists on one page doesn’t mean that all the content of the book is automatically copyright. You have to read what specifically is being copyrighted.

And there’s a huge, enormous, massive difference between “copyright violation” and “plagiarism”. It may be plagiarism but it might not be a copyright violation.

I know you were all waiting for this…

http://www.teddypig.com/2008/01/08/leave-cassie-alone/

It’s in public domain in the US—at least as the law now stands—who knows what it will be after the copyright law gets overhauled again. 

Original publication date of 1902 prior to watershed year of 1923—although there are some specific exceptions in a few western states, all are after 1902. Author died in 1939. 

We need Jane from Dear Author to make this make sense.  Sorry, I’m too tired to explain this properly.

Photo of Ms. Edwards followed by an article noting she has been given a Lifetime Achievement Award, which she should have to bloody well return.

Chrissy - Duly noted that there is photographic proof of her existence!  But here’s the part that REALLY caught my eye:

Each book she writes is well-researched and authentic and she is striving to write about every major Indian tribe in America.

Bwahahahahahaha.  Also, any tribes she has overlooked should breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Teddypig, you kill me, please pass the cowbell.

http://www.myspace.com/cassieedwardsromance 

here’s cassie edwards myspace which lists her at 71 years old. It also had a brief bio of her family.

Concerning the copyright of Indian Boyhood, my understanding is that the text can be copyrighted as well as the typesetting.  As someone else commented, you can print Pride and Prejudice but you can’t do it the same way someone else has printed it.  In the same way, if you have the rights to something you wrote and published, you can sell the second publication rights to someone else but not the precise format and layout in which it was printed the first time, because the first publisher still owns the copyright on how they published your text.

And yes, Charles Eastman was the main character of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Eachtribe is unique in its own copywriteded way. Let the Cassie show you her cutz and pazt skillz has she clips her way through almost every Native American academic manuscript known to mankind while giving each and every buckskin wearing hero stilted dialog and a heap big haired white woman.

I wanted to leave a comment on her page asking for any reaction from her about this, but alas, you must be someone’s friend to comment on their page.  Dammit.  I’m not sure I want to be her friend, actually.

NkB said:
I do have a question, though:  are all the books (SAVAGE LONGING, RUNNING FOX, etc.) with copies in them from the post-google age, and has anyone looked at books she wrote before the internet made all facts available all the time?  She must have some books from the early nineties….  I was just wondering if this is a recent phenomenon or not.

Today I tracked down one of her books published in 1992 called WILD ECSTASY. Not because I’m a glutton for punishment but I can’t help wondering how long this has been going on.  Found my answer.  I’ll be sending another report to the SBs tomorrow once my brain fully recovers, but the short answer is this is NOT a recent phenomenon. 

In this particular book, the copying isn’t as extensive as the examples I located in SAVAGE BELOVED but it’s there nonetheless.  So Google or the ease of copy/paste cannot be used as an excuse.  For me, this just proves the blatant copying of research materials is a standard practice for Ms. Edwards.  I’m tempted to track down her first book and see what gems—or lumps of coal—that book contains.

Of course, now I’ve got that damn song stuck in my head.  You know the one. Come on, everybody.  Sing along with me!

“How long…has this been goin’ on?
How long…has this been goin’ on?

HOW LONG…

Seems rather fitting, doesn’t it?  And for those who don’t know, that’s a song performed by the band Ace, written by lead singer Paul Carrack.  (See?  Attribution isn’t *that* hard.)

So technically she is not plagiarizing because the books from which she lifts whole passages are out of copyright. That still doesn’t make it morally right to use somebody else’s words without crediting the source.

C’mon, Cassie. Give credit where credit is due. Otherwise your epitaph is going to be “She loved to steal from other writers who were dead and couldn’t fight back.”

Obviously, she thinks her readers are too stupid and too indifferent to read or care about an author’s note citing sources. And, you know, she could be right.

Poison Ivy, it’s still plagiarism if the copyright on the original has expired.  It’s no longer copyright infringement because the copyright no longer exists.  There’s a big difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement – namely that copyright infringement is actionable and plagiarism is not.  As it happens, there are a wide number of cases which are both – the Janet Dailey plagiarism of Nora Roberts comes to mind – but if no one has exclusive rights to the text anymore it’s no longer copyrighted and therefore not protected by copyright law.

For example, if she were passing off the plot and dialogue of one of Shakespeare’s lesser plays, it’d still be plagiarism despite the fact that Shakespeare’s works are public domain.  It’s still morally bankrupt even if it can’t be taken to court.

(Please note: I am not a lawyer.  I don’t think I’ve misrepresented anything here as far as the system works in the US, but don’t take my word for it.  Read up on it yourself.)

I know you were all waiting for this…

That’s it—Teddy Pig won the internet, contest over for all eternity.

If everything she lifts from is in public domain, that must mean she takes care to only lift from public domain, and therefore that means she must know what she’s doing is morally wrong and has taken precautions against legal responses.  Now, imagine if she put all this effort into improving her writing, or at the very least her punctuation.

The Cassie Edwards site link with her picture? About 30 seconds after you go there she SPEAKS! Scared the tar out of me, I thought it was my Nanna! : )

If she’s aware of these discussions online I feel kinda squiggy about this much stress on an older person. (is 71 elderly yet?)

anyway that said, I will admit what many of you will not… blog drama is a rush to a bored gal like me (snort)..sooooo

I checked out her wikipedia page.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassie_Edwards#Bibliography

Dunno who contributed the information to wikipedia but I found this passage eyebrow raising..

QUOTE: ...the vast majority of her novels involve Native American tribes. Edwards’s grandmother was a full-blooded Cheyenne, so the meticulously researched novels are in part a tribute to her.UNQUOTE

Well, at 71 she does qualify for a free bus pass, so I think it technically puts her in the elderly arena, but it’s all relative to the person’s fitness. My Mom is 71 and can still chase me and kick my butt. And I’m a runner. And she has a replacement hip. I don’t think kid gloves are needed because of her age. If she’s actually guilty then she should face up to the accusations same as any person.

So, I googled: cassie edwards plagiarism, just to see what came up..whoa nellie…

Have a looksee…

Teddy Pig, yes, rulz all teh internets..OMG!

I’m amazed by the number of people who are confused about the difference between copyright and plagerism.  I’m not faulting you all but the lack of education on this topic.  Working in a library at an academic institution, I hear about both topics all the time. 

Plagerism has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with unlawfully taking credit for someone elses work.  Copyright has more to do with the money that is being made from some ones intellectual property.

It seems to me that for a variety of reasons a lawsuit for copyright infringement is unlikely to be pursued.  HOWEVER, this kind of copying could still cause huge embarrassment to Penguin who, I presume, wish to maintain their reputation as a quality publisher.  My suggestion would be, therefore, that this issue be made as public as possible, with the emphasis not so much on Ms. Edwards (who is not well known outside the Romance field) but on Penguin, which is a well-known and respected publisher.  If they start to see their reputation damaged as a result of this, then they’ll take action to stop it happening again.  And probably drop Ms. Edwards pretty swiftly.

I have loved this research/discovery even though I’ve never read a word by Cassie Edwards (or anyone she borrowed from).  I tipped off Powells that y’all were using them for research purposes and they linked to you in their blog.  And did you know that Penguin USA has a blog also? Maybe if someone comments there they will be quicker to respond?

Penguin Blog (USA)

I’ve tried to leave a comment on the Penguin blog, but they’re moderated so I’m guessing it won’t be published.

I’ve also sent information with links to this website to BBC R4’s Front Row, Open Books and Women’s Hour programs.

I feel like we should stay off of Edward’s MySpace page.  Of course, that’s just my opinion, and I’m not telling anyone else what to do. 

I’m sure that the people from this site would be polite and thoughtful, but the discussion could turn nasty.  This isn’t personal, and it shouldn’t be made to look personal, either by her fans or her detractors - or by the people who intelligently tracked down her lazy-ass plagiarism, not that the SBs would post there anyway. 

And now that I’ve sounded all mature, may I mention that (on a purely personal aesthetic level) I find CE’s MySpace page holy god kitschy?

Well, Bitches, you won’t be visited by one Publisher, that’s for sure. It looks like Margaret Riley at Loose ID doesn’t think too highly of your site.

I can’t think of a more devastating thing to do to an author than to attempt to publicly humiliate her by attacking her work. I’m sure not about to go read any blog that makes a policy of doing so.

Can you point me to the site policy on author humiliation?

Here’s a link to the full post by Ms. Riley:
Putting an end to Blog Hell

*eye roll*

This is what happens when you shoot off your mouth while uninformed.  She specifically says that she doesn’t know what is actually going on, but thinks the SBs are catty and unworthy of her traffic!

The comments were pretty awesome, though.  Not a snarky one in the bunch (when I checked), and I’m sure someone at least thought about it.

Color me ignorant. I thought she’s ChangelingPress not LooseID?

Being of advanced age has not given people immunity to being called to account for their past crimes in infinitely more serious matters than this: think of the 80-something year old who was charged with Nazi war crimes last year after leading a blameless life somewhere in the US for the intervening sixty or so years (sorry, I can’t remember the name to attribute this more accurately). I am not for a moment comparing romance novel plagurism with war crimes, in case someone thinks I am (though I imagine the Bitches are all too smart to think that anyway), but making the general point that age alone is not generally regarded as grounds to avoid responsibility for one’s past actions. There was another case in Britain last year, of a mother and son team who were prosecuted for long-term antiques forgeries: the mother was well on in her eighties, but she was still prosecuted, though I think she escaped a custodial sentence.
If Edwards turns out currently to be suffering from dementia or a terminal illness, that’s a different matter, IMO.  But if she just happens to be 71 but is still the same person who carried out this sustained plaguirism for so long, why shouldn’t she be accountable for it? She’s old enough to know better!

Whoa… I just got back from googling the controversy and my goodness has this kicked up a storm. I’ve noticed most of the negative responses are because Sarah and Candy outing CE isn’t “nice”. Which has lead me to want to say a couple of things.

First, as has already been said, the fact that they brought people’s attention to the fact that CE may have plagiarized isn’t mean, it’s just honest. It may not make everyone happy but there you go, life isn’t always happy and telling the truth isn’t the same as being mean (yeesh!) And if someone *does* do something that’s wrong they *should* be confronted with it.

The second thing is people hating on the SB’s for being generally “mean” - Of course people are entitled to their opinion, and if they feel the need to express said opinion that’s fine… so long as they don’t start getting all rabid and foamy at the mouth. But this site’s called “Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books” and they’re very upfront about their snarkiness. It’s why I check this blog out religiously every day. Well, it’s not just their snarkiness, it’s also that their freakin’ comic geniuses :)

So, while I support people duking things out in a principled way (which can only be a good thing!) I also wanted to say that I *love* the SB’s for being mean! (Actually, I don’t think they’re all that mean… at least unless the person really deserves it *g*)

It is Changeling rather than Loose ID. Rather than focus on the whole publisher thing ... I mean Ms. Riley of Changeling is trying to stay OUT of the fuss ... let’s just nod our heads and smile. It’s not like any publisher has come out in support of CE after knowing all the facts. NO more pot stirring, please! :D

Changeling Press!

Oh my god! There those the poser/furry vote!

Quick we need spin doctors to cover that area. Get Candy and go pet some LOL cats.

Um - are y’all surprised? The authors she’s lifting from are long gone - everyone has known for decades that she’s craptastic, and she makes them pots of money. since no one is going to sue, and if they tick her off someone else gets pots of money….

What did you expect?

Since when is it mean to be honest? This whole concept literally kills me.

Why even bother having the right to speak out against something when all the masses say that even though its wrong, you are mean for saying anything?

WTF?!?

I read this blog everyday. I read it because it is funny & intelligant. I do not read it to feel warm and fuzzy (although sometimes I do). I have bunny slippers for that shit.

Vive la SBs.

You know I still hate her more for the racism than the plagiarism.

I want to get one thing straightened out here.

For those of you calling Mrs. Edwards a racist, you need to read about Mrs. Edwards before assuming something like that.

Mrs. Edwards is part Cheyenne.  She writes about the Native Americans and uses their history so her readers will see that they were not murderers, theives, or savages.

The “Savage” Series is the name given to the books published by Dorchester.  It is in no way racist.

For some reason this site enjoys slamming Mrs. Edwards.  It has been done before.  This is the only review site I know of where authors get put down, called names, and have their names dragged through the mud.

Everyone knows you don’t like Mrs. Edwards or her books.  So why keep reading them? 

Don’t keep saying you didn’t intentionally set out to discredit the author.  No one goes looking on the internet to try to find quotes as you did.

A normal person/reader does not do that.  Only someone trying to get some kind of dirt on a specific author does that.

At first I was angry at your actions.  Now having read all the posts by the same people, saying the same thing, I feel sorry for you.

You have your following, however small it may be and they will agree with you on whatever you say. 

I personally find your actions childish, vindictive, and unprofessional.

Using research material is not copyright infringement nor is it plagiarism.  Most publishing houses do NOT print the research sources even if it is provided.  It simply isn’t done.

Mrs. Edwards did not steal a story line, she did not copy someone else’s story.  She used research to help her readers understand the life and culture of the Native people.

It is not illegal, nor is it plagiarism.

It may not be illegal if the passages she copied weren’t copyrighted, or if the copyright expired already—but it is plagiarism. All the bleating in the universe won’t made this theft anything but the unethical and immoral bullshit it is.

Hey, I’m repeating myself.

No hay peor ciego que quien no quiere ver.

It is not illegal, nor is it plagiarism.

Honey, please to find a dictionary and look up plagiarism?  Plagiarism is taking another’s words and passing them off as your own.  There’s no question that this is what Ms. Edwards has done.

Whether exposing this is a kind thing may be a matter of opinion; me, I favor the truth, especially in light of the fact that Ms. Edwards has been representing to her readership for years that she actually wrote those words—when in fact she did not.

In other words, what Smart Bitches is doing here is a service to the readership, who far outnumber Ms. Edwards.  I’d rather be kind to the readers, who spent their hard-earned money on Ms. Edwards books, only to be offered some flabby rehash of (outdated) academic texts: if I were one of her readers, I’d feel cheated.

I’m sorry you feel that Ms. Edwards has been unfairly maligned, but very little I’ve seen on this site has been about her person, merely about her writing, and the value of it.  And discussions of literature have always been properly held in the public sphere, that’s part of what the public sphere is for.

The SBs (and the rest of us) aren’t really maligning Cassie Edwards’ writing per se, but rather her lack of it.  I work in academics, and every professor and teacher I know has at least once googled phrases from their students’ papers just to make sure there’s no plagarism going on.  And while it may not be illegal, it is taken very seriously because the entire idea of cut-and-paste is anethema to the process of teaching and education.

As a reader of fiction, however, one generally does not look for outright plagarism because, naive readers that we are, we expect the writer with his or her name on the cover to have actually written the entire book!  Imagine.  The idea that there is a published author out there with the same mind-set as the laziest and most apathetic teenager is mind-boggling to me.  Is it really that much trouble to write a sentence on your own???

But whatever.  I don’t read her books anyway.  :P

For those of you calling Mrs. Edwards a racist, you need to read about Mrs. Edwards before assuming something like that.

Mrs. Edwards is part Cheyenne.

Whooptee-doo for her.

You know what?  There are lots of people who are part Native American.  Having a mixed heritage doesn’t confer some special “can’t-be-racist” pass. 

I *have* read some of CE’s work, and it struck me as *highly* racist.  Even if I didn’t have my own small amount of Native heritage, it would still have offended the hell out of me.  Her portrayal of Native Americans as one-dimensional “noble savages” is highly offensive—especially their dialog.  It doesn’t get to the, “How, white man,” level, but damned if it ain’t close to it.

She says she’s working her way through every tribe.  Wouldn’t be surprised to find out some of them had their fingers crossed not to be chosen for this dubious “honor.”