What the hell is up with all these copycats lately? I'm not just talking about fashion (though obviously that bitch on the left should've gone home and changed). No, I'm referring to something much closer to my heart - plagiarism. It's becoming a national phenomenon, like avian-flu anxiety or those pink Uggs from last winter. And I'm beginning to find it just as disturbing.
At first I thought it was funny, with that spoiled Harvard brat getting caught and then trying to lie her way out of it. I mean, it's "chick lit" after all - one of the main requirements is to be as generic and redundant as possible.
And I just found it sad when this guy at school stole several poems to compete in our dinky little school poetry slam. (Taking second place and walking away with a candy bar - which should have been MY candy bar!)
But then it happened to me.
It was unintentional, and the guilty party didn't even attribute the work to herself, (which as it was my writing obviously was a wise move), but to someone else. Who knows how she got mixed up - I'm sure there was no malice intended whatsoever, and in some ways this makes it a pretty mild case of plagiarism, though still, it hurts that I get no credit for the work whatsoever.
Incredibly, the woman who did this is an author herself.
Then Friday at work I open up a letter accusing one of our contributors (I work at a small literary magazine) of plagiarism. It was just a few lines of a poem,
Like a party dress
the night
fell at her feet
in a beautiful mess . . .
Or something like that. And I don't even remember who the authors' were, so in a way I'm plagiarising right now. (Except that nobody reads this).
Could this have been accidental? Maybe.
Maybe not.
Could several people have had the exact same image take form in their heads? Why not? Or, more likely, could one of the authors have gotten the line so embedded in his or her head they started believing it was their own?
Plagiarism, upon closer inspection, is no black and white issue. Like when I did my study on censorship, I'm finding it can be a very small, very personal act. Like repeating a joke, getting a laugh, and then forgetting to credit who it came from. No big deal, right?
What about describing something a certain way, like "She's as dirty as Paris Hilton"? Does this warrant a footnote? Or what if you're one of those really annoying people that quotes whole passages of things when the mood hits you?
Like maybe you're sitting out on the deck, sipping your pink Zima on ice and suddenly you're all
"So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay"
And then everyone else is like "wow, that's really beautiful man". And maybe one of them knows you're quoting Frost but two of them don't. Is this plagiarism?
It's a slippery slope, you know? I'd love to know what you all think - any personal experience here? Any ideas?
6 comments:
Plagiarism sucks. It's becoming a national phenomenon, like avian-flu anxiety or those pink Uggs from last winter.
Wow, well-put, Smelly. Well-put.
er . . . so this Robert Frost guy ripped you off? We should kick his ass.
How come there's nothing to drink down here? What kind of cheapskate comments section is this? Is it a "dry" comments section. Are you some kind of evangelical?
As to plagerism, it must happen accidently now and then, so I suppose nobody should be shot outright. I knew this guy down south, and he seemed nice enough, maybe a bit too friendly and fakly southern, who published a novel and passages of it--the best parts of the novel--were taken direclty from some old novel everybody, or most everybody, had forgotten about. so he got busted and vilified. Other people I know felt sorry for him, but maybe I'm just coldhearted (I am, I am I am . . .). ON the other hand, maybe there is a reason that Ganesha is the god of writers and thieves, because writing in general is almost always to some extend an act of theft. Even sentence patterns and adverbs are often stolen. Tones. Pov techniques. It's quite okay in the industry to use somebody else's line as your title. But to the outright theft, like that Harvard gal or my friend in the south, you gotta wonder how they sleep at night eh?
I imagine they can afford all the good sleeping pills. Not that I would know about that kind of thing.
Thanks for stopping by, Smellrat. Have an O'Douls, my friend. It's that or Grape Puckers on ice. We're having some trouble with the distributor this week.
It's a tough nut to dissect, this plagiarism thing. As Mark Twain said, "Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him." (Got this from Dwight Garner's column on Salon.com)
Geez, at least it's a lesson for me, I guess. I'm so spacey sometimes I'm glad I'm aware of this now, before I rip somebody off myself.
By the way, I'm working on a story about a watermelon and the man who loved it - would you mind looking it over?
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