Ramblings of an Australian Writer

Today, I'm going to blog about plagiarism.


NB: I am not including Fanfic in this. I personally have no problem with it. Professional Fanfic sells very well (just look at the amount of Star Trek, Supernatural, and Doctor Who TV tie-in novels there are for example!) and I have no problem with that, either. I even - *gasp* - own a couple of these tie-in novels. I know, fetch the smelling salts, post haste! Quelle horreur! Etcetera. So no, this post is not a beef with Fanfic. It's a beef with theft. Which I go into detail about below.

I'm a graduated academic. The rules and university policies regarding plagiarism where I studied were/are very stringent. In fact, I would hazard a guess that they are equally stringent in tertiary institutions everywhere. From day one of uni, it was pounded into our heads: plagiarism is bad. In academia, plagiarism will get you expelled. It will get your papers trashed, your academic credibility destroyed. It could well impact on your future career path. In research and writing fields, plagiarism is a big no-no. Plagiarism is defined thus:

Word Origin & History

plagiarism
1621, from L. plagiarius "kidnapper, seducer, plunderer," used in the sense of "literary thief" by Martial, from plagium "kidnapping," from plaga "snare, net," from PIE base *p(e)lag- "flat, spread out." Plagiary is attested from 1597.
- Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper

I love etymology, don't you?

plagiarism definition

Literary theft. Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer's language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own. Copyright laws protect writers' words as their legal property. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, writers take care to credit those from whom they borrow and quote.

Note : Similar theft in music or other arts is also called plagiarism.
- The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

ANYHOODLE. Why am I pontificating about plagiarism? Well, it's not what you might think.

I've been reading a lot of articles and blog posts about the plagiarism going on in Amazon's self-publishing arm, Createspace. I've been absolutely stunned by it, the sheer level of gall some of these people have, including emails with strings of 'HAHAHAHA' and worse when confronted about the situation; and an example of one of the plagiarised titles, Bram Stoker's Dracula repurposed with a new title and author name. It was sold with the title/author of Dracula Amazing Adventure by Maria Cruz. (And the bad grammar in the title alone makes my teeth hurt.)

The NPR article there (link again) is really eye opening. There seems to be some sort of online course whereby someone wanting to make big bucks quick can learn how to do so - as a plagiarist. A lot of the books being sold through Createspace that are plagiarised are stories that have come from the Literotica site, which is free - so the plagiarists are taking these free stories, plonking them in a file, having it kindle formatted and selling it. Other people's words and effort are being exploited by someone else for their own gain. From the article, I quote:

"You can get on some forums, one is called WarriorForum, where they discuss all sorts of marketing things," Penenberg says. "How to make money on the Internet is the idea behind it. The guy that I heard was pirating [...] got onto these forums where they sell you a collection, a zip file full of stories that have been ripped off the Internet and repackaged."

Fast Company has a thorough article about this, here, where they talk to the individual who set up the above. I'm astounded at the amount of 'get rich' schemes that seem to focus on stealing other people's writing. Most of it, too, seems to be erotica. Another article on FC goes more in depth, with side-by-side screengrabs to show the level of the plagiarism. And, it's breathtaking in its audacity, as you can see.

Plagiarism Today has an excellent article on the subject, too.

Then there's this fellow. A David Boyer who, according to this fascinating, thorough blog, has plagiarised over sixty authors, including George R.R. Martin, Dean Koontz, William S. Burroughs and musicians such as Sade and Shania Twain, to name a few. The evidence presented is damning. It's appalling. It made me :O for several minutes. Does the perpetrator care? Not even a little.

I'd never heard of this guy until I went link hopping from the cut-and-paste-and-resell stories about Createspace. But boy howdy, he does get around. Prepare to lose a lot of hours reading about this dude - there is SO much stuff. I'm boggled he's still tripping merrily along his plagiarising way.

It's been said that plagiarists are unhappy people. I think that's disingenuous. Plagiarists don't care. That neither requires happiness or sadness. Though you honestly think a plagiarist is unhappy if they're making good money off someone else's work? Um. I'd say that was a big fat NO.

After all, original creators sweat and tears went into the work, and they reap the benefits by pinching and selling it as theirs. And that, for want of a much better word, SUCKS.

As writers, there is going to be some point that we will need to research something. Unless one is writing something completely new and original, requiring no backup data or confirmation of an idea or theory, research is always going to play at least a minor role in the process of writing. Sometimes that research involves a day trip to your library and perusing microfiche or rare books; sometimes it involves using Google-fu and link hopping; sometimes it involves asking professionals in a given area; sometimes it involves asking your friends and/or colleagues; sometimes in involves all of the above.

Only an idiot would consider marching into a community unprepared and presenting oneself as the be-all and end-all of raw data accumulation in that community. Only the prince of the kingdom of idiots would do so even when the errors of their behaviour and research processes were pointed out to them in gradually increasing volume. And only the emperor of the empire of idiots would back-track after being raked over hot coals by the very community they hoped to engage with the most beloved of internet statements, "OMG U GUISE R SO EBIL/MEEEAN!!!1111!!"

Of course, the above is a satirical and extremely tongue-in-cheek summary of what has happened within research and fanfiction communities. As an academic myself, a researcher and a writer, I find myself raising my eyebrows as this trainwreck unfolds. As a writer of queer fiction and erotica, I find the methodology and language used by these researchers to be problematic at best, highly offensive at worst. The basic theory these two researches are proposing boils down to the following:

The wimminz on the internetz like the porns, which is just as titilating and quaint as those skeery men who like the porns about *gasp* transsexuals.

I wish I could say I was joking, but no, that was the basic premise. Certainly it was geared towards slash writers who are, by and large, women, but certainly not exclusively, and with the expectation that these women are married housewives with nothing better to do than clutch their pearls and exchange naughty stories on the internet. The debate has gone beyond slash writers and fans however, to suggest that any and all women who enjoy same sex erotica fall into this extremely narrow idea.

The thing (out of many in this, not least the lack of research ability applied in this whole scenario, my inner academic and historian is weeping for the future,) is not just the basic lack of understanding of the community or misrepresentation of that community, not just the condescension of the researches towards their key group, but the staggerinly offensive terminology and skewed data collection tools employed. They had a survey up for writers/readers/artists/fans to fill in, which lacked any sort of age cutoff, leaving them open to legal issues regarding age of majority and consent; questions that could - and were - triggering, such as 'Do you have rape fantasies?'

I went and looked at their survey and found many of the questions odd for something that was purporting to be academic. I fail to see how asking which fictional characters you think is your ideal mate is academic. I'm also still stuck on the rape fantasies question which leapt out jarringly at me from the screen with no warning prior to taking the survey or any indication that there would be such questions included. I'm sorry, but I don't see how my finding Dean Winchester a sexy, sexy man is going to in any way, shape or form assist in an academic paper. As an example, natch.

So as boggled as I was, I was still observing this as my personal love of research is something I hold dear and because, well, as the superhero says, 'My Spidey sense was tingling.'

The absolute icing on the cake however, was the final post prior to journal locking by these academics talking about transsexuality with the term 'shemales', using Wikipedia as a citation (!) and comparing women who like m/m erotica with men who watch transsexual porn as a guilty pleasure. (Paraphrased as the exact quote has been locked down in the journal locking.)

To add the final sparkles to all this was the (again paraphrased) belief that only men write and enjoy m/m erotica and we women folk are anomalous for doing so. (Out, out damn spot!)

I'm not going to post the names of these researches because they are already bandied about the internet enough, but I will add a couple of links with excellent roundups and summaries. However, it has since been revealed that this data was being collected not for an academic paper in the field of Neuroscience for Boston University PhD students, but for a book, titled, Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About the Brain.

Methinks the researches have failed to understand the first basic problem here: that they don't quite grasp the concept of 'rule 34,' which is, if someone has thought of it, then there is more than likely to be porn of it.

Links:
Wearing the Juice: A Case Study in Research Implosion.
Fandom to Researches: We Are Not Your Lab-rats.
Ten Steps to a Perfect Fanstorm.

In short, this isn't just about fanfiction writers/readers, but about the perception of women who write and enjoy same-sex erotica in any form and needlessly complicating the reasons for that enjoyment.