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Plagiarism by any name is just as foul

"Plagiarist'' used to be the worst label with which a writer could be smacked. Stealing someone else's intellectual property was the cardinal sin of scribes.

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published April 30, 2006

"Plagiarist'' used to be the worst label with which a writer could be smacked. Stealing someone else's intellectual property was the cardinal sin of scribes.

Now, thanks to what Thomas Mallon calls the "promiscuity'' of material on the Internet, "borrowing'' from others has become not only more tempting, but apparently more acceptable.

"There is a decreased belief that anyone owns their writing,'' Mallon, author of a 2001 history of plagiarism, Stolen Words, lamented to me in a telephone interview. "The simple availability - promiscuity - of material on the Internet has changed the concept of intellectual property, the idea that all the things floating around in the ether belong to someone. That's a real philosophical shift that I think is alarming."

After all, says Mallon, "The ability to own one's writing is the spurt to creativity."

Teachers have reported a dramatic increase in cases of plagiarism as students dip into what Mallon dubs the "great common feast'' of the Internet. It is becoming harder to convince them to respect the importance of other people's works.

No wonder. While plagiarism might still get you expelled from some schools, in the real world it is not the career-ender it used to be. Look at historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Accused of plagiarism in 2002, she has come roaring back to the talk show circuit, promoting her award-winning book on Lincoln, with little mention of her past transgressions. It was enough that she had acknowledged that parts of her colleagues' work ended up in her books - and apologized.

Or consider the latest plagiarism flap, involving a debut writer.

Last Sunday, Harvard Crimson staff writer David Zhou posted on the campus newspaper's Web site several strikingly similar passages from 19-year-old sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, and two coming-of-age novels by Megan F. McCafferty.

Did Viswanathan hang her head in shame?

No, she went on the Today show and defended herself. Never directly admitting that she plagiarized from McCafferty's novels, she used the weasel word "borrowing." Yes, she had read the novels - Sloppy Firsts, published in 2001, and Second Helpings, published in 2003 - in high school, reread them, loved them and internalized them, Viswanathan told Katie Couric. But she hadn't consulted McCafferty's books when she was writing her own, she insisted. Any resemblance between her work and McCafferty's was "unintentional'' and due to her "photographic memory," she told the New York Times.

Of course, where the line is drawn between plagiarism and unconscious borrowing is open to debate. But can any reasonable person read these following two passages - and, according to McCafferty's publisher, there are 40 such examples - and honestly believe that an unintentional act of memory accounts for their parallel structures?

From page 7 of McCafferty's first novel: "Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget's braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes."

From page 14 of Viswanathan's novel: "Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla's glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.''

They read as if they were produced by a McBook computer program, which provided a template and simply asked the writer to drop in her own specifics. (A disturbing thought and one worth examining more closely, considering the fact that a book packager, the ironically named Alloy Entertainment, helped Viswanathan "conceive" and edit her book and jointly holds the copyright of the work with her, a practice common in the world of young adult fiction that could lend itself to a cookie-cutter approach to writing.)

The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were very keen on protecting the intellectual property rights of "Authors and Inventors.'' Intellectual property, in fact, is the only property specifically protected in the U.S. Constitution (the Fifth Amendment guarantees that the government cannot seize property without just compensation, but nowhere in the Constitution is it specified that citizens have the right to tangible property such as land). Men of creativity themselves, the framers of the Constitution understood that in order to encourage creativity and innovation, two essential ingredients for a democratic society, people have to be assured that their work will be protected.

"Writers are not jazz musicians - notes too faithfully borrowed do not constitute a tribute, but a crime, so this is a very serious charge,'' says John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, the country's leading organization of book reviewers, commenting on the affaire d'Opal.

The publishing world, however, doesn't seem to be as concerned about purloined words as the music world has been about stolen songs. Readers, not publishers (nor book reviewers, for that matter), first alerted McCafferty that someone was aping her words. Little, Brown originally only offered to make alterations in later editions of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life - though by week's end the publisher finally yanked the book with its "borrowed" passages from bookstores.

"Preventing plagiarism (is) tricky territory,'' says Freeman. "No one will find a fact checker who has read everything.''

Ultimately then, it is left to the writers themselves to defend their works - something I hope McCafferty will do.

A writer's words and how they are strung together, after all, are all we have.

[Last modified May 2, 2006, 10:27:19]