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erastesThank you all for your kind wishes, messages, emails, silly (and nice) pictures (specially Lee, thank you! :) ) This is what I love about the internet community that I have, I don’t think it’s sad or lonely of me to have internet friends, because although I may never meet any or most of you – I get a sense of friendship from you all when something goes wrong! Just remind me never to 1. Eat Wall’s sausages again and specially not 2. those that you left out of the fridge overnight and THEN grilled. Honestly. You’d think I’d know better. The quickest route to food poisoning I know, save heating a pork pie.
I watched an old film yesterday that bunnied me hugely.
Can’t really say more than that – and it will be a year or so before I even have the time to get started on it, but I made notes on the idea today. it’s only an idea at the moment, and i’m only borrowing the concept of one scene.
Thanks to gehayi for this link. No. “Mixing” is not allowable you MORON We spell “mixing” like this. P.L.A.G.I.A.R.I.S.M. The number of times I see authors say this – and others who say “hey – Shakespeare did it, so why not?” Well frankly because 1. There were no copyright laws when Shakespeare did it – and 2. He wrote Soap Opera for the masses. and 3. BAH! Stealing other people’s plots and characters and TEXT is wrong. God! I didn’t go to university and yet I understand that it’s just about the first thing that is taught there, but no-one needed to ever explain that taking even ideas from someone else is questionable! When I was about 8 I did just that. I wrote a 20 page story that I ripped off from something I’d read – and you know what? The teacher loved it and I got a lot of praise for it. And I still carry the guilt of it TODAY.
Yes! I have tropes in Standish which are easily recognisable from films and books from other Regency stories. The duel in the early morning mist, the rake, the virgin, Bath blah blah blah – but Jeez – i invented the characters – however “familiar” they may be for the genre – they aren’t stolen from someone else.
I see JKR is being accused of it again too. Qu’elle Surprise.
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Date: 2010-02-20 02:22 pm (UTC)Shopping over. Guildford now. Stomach went mad in waitrose -- thank god for clean loos.
Will be around tonight. All revved up to finish man porn and edit drm
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Date: 2010-02-20 02:40 pm (UTC)she wondered if PJ wasn't allowed by bloomsbury and JKR who is a dragon about these things - because of it, we agreed to sod it and get the new artemis fowl book instead)
I was accused of plagiarism on a fanfic from a writer i didn't like and sure as hell hadn't read and the two passages were similar (they were sex scenes, how can they not be?) so i manned up and took out the passage, she started a war of hate against in which she ended up looking like the villain. But I discovered in the process of this that Nabokov had plagiarised Lolita which bore a "striking similiarity" to an 1918 German story. Irvine Washington discovered that one of his stories was "eerily similar" to a book he had read ten years before and asked the publishers to remove it as a case of accidental plagiarism. And that psychologists had discovered that it is possible to do it accidentally, there's even a term for it
not that that is what this is
she stole it
plots are fair game, characters are okay because the instant you start to work with them they become influenced by your linguistics and become new anyway, but TEXT!
she says it's ironic, i wonder if she got that definition from alanis morrisette?
I did my brother's creative writing homework once, he got accused of ripping it off from a book - i was on cloud 9 for days
what annoys me about plagiarism is not standing on my high horse going I wrote that beautiful sentence you muse praise me but the laziness of it, the instant it got hard they cheated, and that's it
not crediting a source by mistake - that's one thing (like writing about Samurai and not mentioning Stephen Turnbull - why are all the books on the samurai written by stephen turnbull?) but to copy out a passage from one of his books and claim it as your own it's lazy, when you could copy it, admit you took it and no one would care.
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Date: 2010-02-20 02:54 pm (UTC)Caps lock post is caps lock.
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Date: 2010-02-20 03:19 pm (UTC)"Mixing."
Feh.
Schools need to fund a new post--plagiarism detection. Detect, blow the whistle, and confine the perps to a library with paper and pencil only, until they can produce an essay from their own under-exercised brains. Half the term papers handed in these days--probably more than half--are simply lifted off the internet. The new rule seems to be that if you can get away with it, it's all right. It's been going on for a decade or more, and the results are starting to show.
Everything that's written or performed inspires new interpretations. The hit TV series Alias Smith and Jones was a revisiting of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--the creator admitted it. But different storylines, different actors, a different premise... it became something new.
Lots of us use established characters or plot ideas as the seed of a new story. I'm willing to bet that 95% of the folks writing sexy vampires are fans of Buffy, Lestat, or one of the other big-time (I almost wrote bite time) series. I've done this; we probably all have. How many films are there with "a Luke Skywalker type?"
But taking a fanfic idea and reworking it into something new doesn't mean lifting entire scenes from other people's work and pretending that we wrote them ourselves. What's okay in fan fiction--nonprofit, amateur efforts done for one's own amusement--is not the same as expecting to be paid for someone else's work.
These imbeciles really don't know the difference.
I sometimes think our "culture" is becoming nothing more than a series of cow's stomachs, where the same material is endlessly reprocessed for an audience that's becoming increasingly uncritical. Look at the films out today. Oceans #whatever, Cartoon Heroes Blow Things Up, Aging 'Action' Hero Gets Trigger-happy... I wish they'd at least raid the box where the good stories are kept, and do some of the less frequently performed plays by Shakespeare. Who did lift plots, certainly... but he added to the store of culture.
You feel guilty because you have a sense of ethics. I'm not sure some of the entitlement babies ever grew one.
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Date: 2010-02-20 03:32 pm (UTC)Sorry you haven't been well and glad you're getting over it - I haven't been on LJ in ages.
,she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,
Right, blame your generation. And what on earth does it mean, no such thing as originality, just authenticity?' That sounds like the sort of thing pretentious people say when they're trying to dazzle you with their false cleverness. Meaningless drivel.
I wonder how she would feel if I stole her plot and characters, 'mixed' them and published it as my own? Anybody who doesn't get the difference between using genre tropes or generic plots and lifting words right out of someone else's work doesn't deserve the name writer.
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Date: 2010-02-20 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 03:47 pm (UTC):)
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Date: 2010-02-20 03:49 pm (UTC)This icon is what I want to say to Hegemann.
Date: 2010-02-20 04:31 pm (UTC)I bet she'd scream bloody murder. Plagiarists always do when someone uses anything even remotely attached to the stuff they stole.
I remember one plagiarist from my
a) There were a few billion stories in the world that had princesses as characters; and
b) The critic's story had been written three years before the plagiarist's story, so she wasn't copying from the girl who had plagiarized from others, unless she had a time machine.
The plagiarist, however, did not have that excuse. She had, in fact, copied something from a pre-existing story. Yes, this was called plagiarism. No, everyone did NOT do it, and even if everyone DID, it would still be wrong...not to mention despicable.
You would be amazed at how many times these facts had to be explained to the brain-dead troglodyte. Positively amazed.
I also recall a Deleterian coming to the comm bewildered one day, saying she'd been accused of plagiarism by someone she'd never heard of because the Deleterian had used the same title as the idiot. And it wasn't a particularly original title. It was something along the lines of "The New Girl." (Which the Deleterian admitted was lame. She said that she'd written the story some years back, when she was eleven or twelve.) However, nothing could convince the idiot that anyone could have concocted such a vibrant and unique title on her own.
What really angers me is that Hegemann is being rewarded for her plagiarism. She is being told, in effect, that stealing verbatim from other authors is not stealing at all. And she's being told this by authors who are acting as judges for what seems to be prestigious award.
I can recall learning before kindergarten that if you didn't do a particular piece of work, you don't put your name on it. My parents were pretty explicit about that, and about telling me that copying someone else's work and putting my name on it--no matter what the reason--was wrong.
I'm sorry that Hegemann's parents didn't bother to teach her that ethic. And I'm equally sorry that she didn't acquire that ethic on her own.
I'll make a point of not buying the books with her name on them.
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Date: 2010-02-20 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 04:35 pm (UTC)the great irony there - how many times have his books been ripped off?
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Date: 2010-02-20 04:41 pm (UTC)::shakes fist::
Re: This icon is what I want to say to Hegemann.
Date: 2010-02-20 05:49 pm (UTC)Her father is the manager of a rather famous theatre in Berlin in which apparently "mixing" is common practice. (I'm not sure whether they always credit their sources there - they might, but I'm not sure about that! It's also one of those theatres in which the name of the director is often written bigger than that of the writer, because quite often it's considered ro be more important.) So she might actually have been influenced by that.
Which doesn't make it right, of course!
Re: This icon is what I want to say to Hegemann.
Date: 2010-02-20 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 07:09 pm (UTC)I'm beginning to wonder about what have been "prestigious" awards, and the politics involved in getting onto the committees. And losing respect for a lot of them in the process.
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Date: 2010-02-20 07:11 pm (UTC)(sound of cat expelling a hairball...)
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Date: 2010-02-20 07:16 pm (UTC)but I do know that Graham Greene went to his grave thinking the reason that the end of the affair was snubbed by the literary establishment was because he was catholic, he was up for the nobel prize for literature for it, and got scammed, and when Seamus Heaney made the joke that he would never win the nobel because he was white, catholic and a man he won it the next year.....
so of course politics don't come into it
and how many times have you picked up a book nommed for the Booker and it's just BAD, it's unreadably self congratulatory wank! (to be fair I really like Ondaatje and Carey)
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Date: 2010-02-20 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-20 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 05:34 am (UTC)