No, really, plagiarism doesn’t ‘just happen’

(No, I don’t spend a lot of time looking up these stories, they just show up on my horizon.)

If one were very, very charitable, one would imagine that someone who doesn’t read much, or who doesn’t spend much time online, would not know what plagiarism actually is, and therefore, one would be able to excuse/justify/explain people like Cassie Edwards (“oh, she’s so old, she couldn’t have known better”) or Kristi Diehm (“oh, but she’s just a blogger”), plagiarists.

I am not that charitable, by far. My mother is about Ms Edwards’ age, and she knows very well, not only what constitutes plagiarism, but that plagiarizing is both intellectually lazy and morally wrong. For her part, Kristi Diehm had written (and then deleted), a full post on the topic before going on to steal other people’s intellectual content. Also, I’m ‘only’ a blogger *snort* and I’ve known what plagiarism is well before colleges and high schools started using turnitin to catch it.

I’m even less inclined to excuse people like, say, Timothy Parker, who earned a Guinness World Record as most syndicated crosswords compiler back in 2000. Parker gets paid royalties and fees for this work; instead,  he copied old crossword puzzles almost clue by clue, raking in plenty of money over the years, for work other people had already done–or by reusing his own word under fake bylines.

The original investigation was published earlier this month by fivethirtyeight, and the story was picked up by the New York Times and other big news outlets today.

Pondering copyright: an unpopular position

Reader beware: this is a long post, with multiple links to further reading. It is also likely to bring down the fury of pattern creators all around the web, if they ever happen to find my humble online abode (which isn’t likely, but could happen) and probably make me persona non-grata in many online crafting circles. Read at your own peril, and feel free to have at me in the comments.

Further disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I don’t play a lawyer on television or online. I am not offering legal advice. I am sharing what I have learned by doing a bit of research.

Long, long before SOPA or other variants were even thought off, I had declared my hatred of all things piracy, most particularly when the pirated items are books, but also in general. (You are welcome to do a Google search for my comments at the time of the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal–handle azteclady–and later on, here and here)

The reason for copyright, if I understand it correctly, is to provide incentive to the artist. If a person can’t profit from her creativity, then other things—like, say, making ends actually meet—will take precedence. When creativity is stifled, innovation tends to slow down. To a crawl not dissimilar to that of frozen molasses.

However, taking copyright to the extreme also stifles creativity because, in most cases, new stuff starts as old stuff that someone looks at in a different way. All those “what if I did this first instead of that?” or “wouldn’t it look better if I didn’t put that there?” lead to entirely different things and ways of doing things.

So there must be a balance, right?

Plagiarism — not just for money (and other almost random things)

How the wheel turns!

Way back when, after the SBTB exposed Cassie Edwards’ plagiarism, they got called all sorts of names. Hey, someone even wondered if Ms Edwards had run over the Bitches’ puppy (I don’t have the link, but I’m sure someone will provide it at some point).

If memory serves, months later there were some folks still bemoaning the mean girls who had almost killed Ms Edwards by making public something that was “a private matter” (I kid you not, this was said, word by word).

Now it seems that some enterprising thief has been lifting reviews pretty much verbatim from AAR–as well as copying their ratings and rating system. (Mind, this kid also lifted Kristie(J)’s blog name–no, no linkage for the thief–so color me not much surprised by the news).

The funny thing is that there are some who wonder why the blogosphere is not as incensed over the theft of reviews from AAR as it was over Ms Edwards’ 20+ years of plagiarism.

Huh.

What’s in a word?

Originally posted at Karen Scott’s blog

A bit about plagiarism from someone who is not a lawyer, doesn’t want to be a lawyer, and doesn’t play a lawyer in the internet.

I’m sure that a lot of people who travel the romance blogosphere routinely got tired pretty quickly of the many discussions on plagiarism, copyright infringement, intellectual honesty, and other related topics sparked by the CE dêbacle (or the SavageGate, which I believe Seressia Glass coined).

However, the Obama speech incident reignited discussion on this at a couple of places I visit, and once again I was impressed by the varied and well, weird ways people can look at things.