she who is - the BNF dance, or, Plagiarism is a Crime

From: ashenmote Date: August 10th, 2006 02:46 pm (UTC) (Link)

it may remain uncited (considered common knowledge) until such time as someone asks.
If and when such time arrives, you are to threaten the questioner with lawsuits and have them driven out of fandom by rabid poodles, after which benedictory silence and Tux Penguin comes into effect again.

I assure you my senses are in perfect order. Cassandra Claire's fanfiction is mostly not plagiarism? Possible. And the discussion on Bad Penny report is mostly not a witchhunt, so what?

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From: apoplexia Date: August 10th, 2006 03:26 pm (UTC) (Link)

I haven't read the bad_penny write up, and probably never will, since, y'know, life is short. But it is important to distinguish between plagiarism and being derivative.

I save being the plagiarism police for when I'm at work and it actually, well, matters.

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From: wankprophet Date: August 10th, 2006 03:49 pm (UTC) (Link)

The one entry I read on CC, she was definitely being plagiaristic. As you and I know (being/having been English teachers), people like to, well, try to obscure their plagiarism so they can claim technicalities. Lots of them weren't literal word-for-word-all-the-way-down examples of plagiarism -- they were literal word-for-word-partway-then-a-few-changes-before-resuming-word-for-word-wash-and-repeat -as necessary examples. I had more than one student try to tell me it wasn't plagiarism because s/he was just incorporating the words and using their own words scattered throughout. I even had a couple of parents try to tell me that after I flunked their pweshiush 19 year old. I just explained, with as much patience as I could muster, that it's still plagiarism in much the same way as the occasional right answer on a test didn't make their kid less of a dumbass overall. Okay, I didn't phrase it quite like that, but still...

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From: apoplexia Date: August 11th, 2006 06:34 am (UTC) (Link)

My favourite this semester was: I don't know how this could have happened! I must have done it subconsciously! I suppose theoretically your fingers could be hitting controls c and v without you noticing, but it's a bit of a stretch.

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From: wankprophet Date: August 10th, 2006 04:10 pm (UTC) (Link)

I'm going to disagree on whether most of it wasn't plagiarism. The "until someone asks" rule is neither a legal nor a moral standard -- and even if you gloss over stealing ideas or tropes, you *always* cite when you're lifting passages verbatim unless it can reasonably be argued that the passages are of such common parlance that citation is either redundant or meaningless. If I say "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth," I don't have to cite the Bible. Ditto "To be or not to be" and Shakespeare. Both can reasonably be considered cultural artifacts within our society. OTOH, lifting entire paragraphs and scenes, even if you try to obscure the plagiarism by adding your own touches, from works of relatively limited prominence in the cultural discourse (Pamela Dean? Roger Z.? both are popular *in certain circles* but can hardly be argued to be known by heart by a large percentage of the population), you're commiting rather flagrant plagiarism. Even if they were directly cited as being other peoples' words -- and they weren't -- they'd still run afoul of copyright. It's not in any way a grey area here. The words were lifted straight from another persons' text and used as if the lifter had originated them. "Inspired by" means you take a cue from, or, at worst, imitate. There's a substantiative difference between imitation and theft.

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From: naienko Date: August 10th, 2006 05:19 pm (UTC) (Link)

I guess I didn't make myself clear. I'm attempting to draw a distinction between three things: 1) the wholesale lifting of full passages, which ought not to be done, cited or no; 2) the usage of specific and probably well-known-by-the-fandom lines from a given show or book, which ought to be cited in brief; and 3) the imitation of a given scene or idea, which is a very grey area but I don't consider /plagiarism/. Copyright infringement, yes. Plagiarism, no. What I was trying to point out was that about a third of the examples, particularly of the sort I quoted, are very much either #3, or they are plain and simple accidental coincidence, cited as plagiarism by an incensed group of people looking for as much as possible to hang Cassie with.

Cassie made herself plenty of rope with the underworld scene. This scouring of her work for lines, words, ideas and phrases that might remotely be considered related to other, already published work, is excess. white_serpent /encouraged/ others to go out and find more plagiarism, under the apparent assumption that where there is one passage, there may be more. She may be right. *shrugs* I never read the DT, I don't intend to start now. I'm certainly not going to go in and find a passage that contains the word "parchment" and claim Cassie plagiarised. I /object/ to that nearly as strongly as I object to the original act of plagiarism.

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From: khym_chanur Date: August 10th, 2006 10:16 pm (UTC) (Link)

The thing is, Cassie borrowed dialogue from so many different sources that most readers aren't going to recognize all of them, and many of them will think Cassie came up with the wity quotes that they can't recognize. I've heard that lots of people praise Cassie for her wity dialogue, which seems to be a case of people not recognizing some of the quotes she used, and when Cassie doesn't say "Thanks, but the witty dialogue is all stuff I borrowed", she takes credit for the work of other people, which is plagiarism to me.

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From: naienko Date: August 10th, 2006 11:24 pm (UTC) (Link)

The stuff from Dracula, the comparison of Chapter 14 with Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon, Chapter 9 -- that is not plagiarism. It's got nothing to do with witty dialogue, which I absolutely agree she nicked from here there and yonder. Absolutely, not all the quotes have been found. But some of the bits, even in the write up, which are being cited as evidence are not. Inspiration, clever paraphrase, but generic enough ideas are being paraphrased that nobody could ever hope to stand behind a claim that she plagiarised those bits. Just ... no.

Please, please look at the quote I lifted from the fanhistory wiki, which has been linked several times. If that comparison truly represented plagiarism, no honest person would write, ever. That is the kind of thing I am worried about, not that "innocent" fangirls will continue to claim that because it's not a word-for-word match in many cases she didn't actually plagiarise.

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From: jennilee Date: August 10th, 2006 11:14 pm (UTC) (Link)

"You're in Gryffindor... you're idea of a cunning plan is 'everyone oon the count of three'"

~DS

"One two three? One two three isn't a plan, it's Sesame street."

~ Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

Actually, "Your idea of a cunning plan is 'everyone on the count of three'" is verbatim from Black Adder, not Buffy. Shall have to go and tell white_serpent that.

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From: naienko Date: August 10th, 2006 11:26 pm (UTC) (Link)

/That/'s plagiarism!

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From: littlebitca Date: August 11th, 2006 05:16 pm (UTC) (Link)

In a way, this is part of what makes CC's form of plagiarism so insidious. The line evokes a line from Buffy, but it's only evocative and not plagiaristic unless one is also familiar with Black Adder, in which case it's not evocative but exact and completely plagiaristic. I doubt anyone will find all the instances of direct but uncredited quotations in the fic. But I daresay someone will try.

Which comes to the point you were making in the first place: it's time to stop. It's beginning to be bit like crystalwank where people were going all over the place and bringing practically anything she ever posted to fandom_wank with "OMG! And she said/did this, too!!" Most of which was pretty banal but now it was crystal and therefore interesting. Except that it was really just banal.

The examples that were pulled together are more than enough to show that plagiarism took place in the DT, and that it wasn't limited to the first few chapters of the first book, but throughout. The evidence is there, the reputation has been thrown into question and now it's up to Cassie to show in her original work that she has what it takes to write without using the work of many other people.

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From: white_serpent Date: August 11th, 2006 06:59 am (UTC) (Link)

Just to note: I believe I linked that example from an old thread on Fandom_Wank (which is, I assume, the same place that the fanhistory.com wiki got it). It does not actually appear as one of my examples, basically because I didn't find it convincing.

If I can figure out where it comes from in the Draco Trilogy and where it appears in Black Adder, however, I will add it.

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From: white_serpent Date: August 11th, 2006 07:16 am (UTC) (Link)

Actually, I can't even find a place I've linked to it in Part XII. Go figure.

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From: naienko Date: August 11th, 2006 12:21 pm (UTC) (Link)

basically because I didn't find it convincing

That's comforting.

Gods, it's hard to find a way to say something like that on jf without being taken for sarcasm! Here, have some dack daniels.

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From: white_serpent Date: August 13th, 2006 05:15 pm (UTC) (Link)

:) Thanks.

I'd also like to say that my goal in tracing authors and sources isn't to humiliate the plagiarists. I know there are a lot of things in these works that people love. What I'd like them to know is where those things came from. One of the good outcomes of this has been a big increase in Pamela Dean's sales on Amazon. I (like others) will probably be going out to buy People Could Fly. I didn't know that some of the imagery in the DT came from Tanith Lee; maybe I'll read more of her books.

So, I'm not trying to trigger a witch hunt. It may turn into that, but it's not what I'm trying to do.

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