From the troubled to the troubling
Having struck a chord with a lot of readers earlier this week, I’m going to probably alienate many of them right now. The How Publishing Really Works blog declared 17 July Anti-Plagiarism Day.
Okay, I can see why. I do understand how galling it is to have work stolen and when it happens to a writer you admire immensely, as it did recently to a writer who is like a literary deity to me, then it almost feels worse than having your own work stolen.
However … most plagiarism that I hear of in the quotidian sense of the word is online, not print. That is, people have posted work online or had it accepted by some online journal or zine and that is what has been copied without their permission. And in this sense of the word plagiarism I think writers are at grave risk of making the same mistake as the recording industry in trying to patrol, rather than join, the technological revolution.
How many writers don’t own an MP3 player? How many don’t use the internet for research? And in all those cases (most if not all of us) do we make sure we have paid for the music we download or copy from a friend? Do we ensure we have the permission of every writer whose work we pillage to create our own? And do we then cite them in our acknowledgements? Are all our videos and DVDs and CDs unpirated …?
Right. I thought not.
So where do we get off on telling others to respect our rights to material in the electronic media? I’m not saying plagiarism is okay, I’m saying that it’s very easy to get on a high horse about something that we, ourselves, tend to do in other areas of life. You’re damaging the livelihood of a musician if you rip music from your friend’s hard drive to your own. You’re stealing the intellectual property of other writers if you use their material for research and don’t cite them (and who cites anything when writing for blogs or websites?) Giving an url, as I have above, is about as far as we go in acknowledging our sources, let alone honouring their rights.
So we need a different paradigm, not a police force. We, the writers, need to work out for ourselves how we benefit from the public exposure in online media and what we want to do about ensuring we get the benefit, rather than losing it to people who borrow or steal our words. What we don’t need is to get sniffy, miss the boat, and find ourselves like record companies – dealing with an explosion in interest in our material but with no way to profit from that interest because we’ve alienated all the technology innovators who might have helped us.
Plagiarism is wrong. Print plagiarism is unforgivable (what are publisher’s legal departments for, if not to prevent this?) but online plagiarism needs a debate, and it needs it now.
PS You can decide for yourself whether the pig picture shows greediness in action or happy harmony – clever, aren’t I?
11 Comments
Jim Murdoch
18th July 2009I agree. I think the two issues here are really motive and profit or maybe that’s just one issue: motive. I couldn’t produce the kind of articles I write as fast as I can without the benefit of the Internet. I cut huge chunks out of websites and blogs and paste them into one whopping great Word document that I can search quickly. I do go to great lengths to ensure that I credit my sources and I always include a link.
Well, not always. A nice lady sent me an e-mail a while back asking if she could quote something I’d written and I read it out to Carrie and said, “You know, I don’t remember writing that.” After a bit of checking it turns out I hadn’t. I’d just missed the quotes so that was embarrassing. But I told the nice lady where I got my data from and I fixed the quote.
My motive in writing my articles is to collate information for a variety of sources that are already out there and that anyone can go and click on the sites involved . . . for free. I’m not trying to present myself in any rosier light than to say I research thoroughly. My hope is that people will click on these links and read the full articles in question. To my mind this is how the Internet works best when we promote each other. It’s not plagiarism, it’s free advertising.
How do I profit from all my efforts? Certainly not financially and I think that’s where the Internet deserves a bit of latitude because no one makes any real money from online writing. The Internet is one gigantic ad for something else. The free stuff is just a way of roping us in. My whole blog exists in the hope that someone will click on the link to my website and maybe buy one of my books. And like that’s happening.
Vanessa
18th July 2009So lets get this right.
You think it might (repeat, might) be perfectly acceptable for someone to take something you wrote and had published online somewhere decent-(meaning it is good stuff, not the rubbish one can find online….), change it a teensy little bit, but keep the structure, characters, plot, images, and a very specific denouement device…add a few flights of language… then enter it for a competition whose terms state clearly ‘must be your own work and unpublished’….?
And you would advise your students that they can do this sort of thing without worrying about it ?
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of course not. But you see, where’s the line? I know we need to think differently with the net. BUT it is surely indefensible for some saddo to trawl the net looking for prizewinning work, then change it a modicum and enter it for a comps as his own. Or to do so with a printed version. Its the same, to me.
Quillers
19th July 2009I think there are two issues here. One is using other peoples’ ideas and passing them off as your own, which is plagiarism.
The other is downloading MP3s or pdf files then sharing them around your friends, which is copyright infringement.
Yes, we’ve all shared music and pdf files, just as when many of us were younger (I’m talking in the days before iPods and downloads) we all recorded the Top 40 chart, hoping to miss off the irritating talky bits at the beginning and end of each song.
Many people have downloaded pdf books, then shared them with friends. And I totally take your point that it’s damaging the livelihoods of those we steal from. though I’d also argue that more often than not if we’re sent a song or pdf book that we admire, we’re more likely to go on and buy everything else the artist/author has done – at least that’s been the case with me. After all, in the past, offline, how many people have discovered new authors because their friends passed on a book, or new singers because we were loaned a CD? Yet no one in the ‘real’ world says we shouldn’t be sharing our old books or music.
But that’s different to going on and claiming we wrote the songs/books ourselves, and submitting them to markets or competitions. Because then, we’re not only damaging the author’s livelihood, we’re also directly profiting from their hard work.
So whilst I completely take your point that few of us are in a position to take the moral high ground regarding copyright infringement, I do think a plagiariser stands much further down the slope. And to actively steal someone else’s hard work and pass it off as your own is the lowest of the low.
I’m going now, whilst I can still escape this metaphor 😉
Sara Crowley
19th July 2009Hmm.
Personally I do not watch pirated dvds and I don’t illegally download anything. I can’t see that it’s the same thing at all though. Once our words are published online they are often (usually) free to anyone who wishes to read them. It’s not the reading of them that is the problem here. It is as if someone were to download music from X, switch a few notes around and then gain a record deal under the name Y. Music that is clearly down to someone else’s creativity.
Kay Sexton
19th July 2009I think Jim’s taken my point best, that plagiarism – horrible as it is – is a small part of a much bigger picture that involves piracy, intellectual property and the whole model of online media and writers deserving both credit and payment for their work. As for music, believe me, it’s as much an issue to ‘sample’ or ‘mash’ as it is to take somebody’s writing, change a few bits and say it’s yours. But there the musicians have fought like stink for their rights (google ‘Michael Jackson plagiaism’ to see both sides of that coin) and largely managed, through volume of income, to gain redress.
Similarly the computer gaming industry has a teaching standard that focuses on fair use, plagiarism, copyright and citation as part of NVQ, BTEC and degree courses because fingers have been burned.
So why are people doing ‘it’ and getting away with it, in the world of writing, and doesn’t it need a bigger set of answers than stopping plagiarism alone?
Vanessa Gebbie
19th July 2009I have never downladed anything, or used illegally downloaded files from anyone else, knowingly. Maybe Im a minority? Don’t care really.
I dont see any difference between writing, music, art, photography… its all someone’s own creative endeavour, up there to be enjoyed if its placed appropriately, with the name of the original creator attached firmly, not changed into someone elses.
Kay Sexton
19th July 2009So as long as they put your name up there, they can use your writing for free …? That’s not the way that music, film or photography works, they are all licensable works.
so … if you send something to a contest and you don’t win, you’re happy for them to publish your work anyway, without pay, if they put your name on it? Even though you can’t then submit it to places that would have paid you or to other contests?
My point is that plagiarism is just the dirty tip of a very big stick that many writers don’t see the need to bother about until it hits them. And writers have no effective trade or professional body, union or association, to argue collectively over our rights to our work.
Vanessa
19th July 2009er no! my bad communication. ‘Appropriately’ was intended to mean placed in the right place by the right people with the permission of the creator.
But you are clser than you think with the comp topic.
I brought up the comp issue with Manchester Short Story comp as aired recently on my blog. Their guidelines state expressly that they retain a licence to publish any work they select out of the entries. Not just the shortlisted ones.
Their small print is rather badly worded. It was clarified by the administrator, who emailed me to explain that yes, they do indeed retain the right to publish everything! Even though it is unlikely that they would. But they are prepared to enter into individual agreements with individual writers of all entries other than the shortlisted ones, to not publish.
Shortlisted writers who are not winners lose their stories to Mnchester, who will retain the right to publish them online or in print as they wish.
Kay Sexton
19th July 2009Vanessa, it was indeed that competition and another American one (can’t find details, it was scifi/fantasy and a student alerted me to the fine print) that I had in mind when I typed my reply. It’s simply unethical of competition organisers to behave this way, but as long as writers enter, rather than boycotting, they WILL get away with it.
Appalling, isn’t it?
Vanessa Gebbie
19th July 2009I have to admit I haven’t seen this clause before on any competitions, and on the face of it it seems unreasonable…but it may be that the wording is simply not conveying the correct info. But was copied verbatim from some other place and just zapped into the ‘contract’.
Elizabeth Baines has a different explanation (given confusingly by the same office!) which seems to say that ‘selected’ works is only the ‘winners’. But if that is the case, why not say so clearly!
I am still confused, and it is a shame that it isn’t clearer. As one interpretation of the ambiguous wording is my interpretation, and as the admins agreed I was right, it seems a really odd thing to include.
Nope, I am not entering.
a) I can’t afford the entry fee.
b) The only things I have to enter are sections of the novel…
and
c) I am not prepared to ‘lose’ a section of the great oeuvre in this way, and to make matters worse, PAY to lose it!
Mark Hubbard
19th July 2009I’ve found the 100% perfect way to not be plagiarised.
Publishers have agreed not to publish me 🙂
Apparently.