Plagiarism — not just for money (and some other almost random things)
Thursday, April 22, 2010Posted in: Azteclady Speaks, Cassie Edwards, Laurie Gold, Plagiarism
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.
How about that.
Mind, I have my suspicions, but I would like to know what the peanut gallery thinks of this apparent double standard.
* * *
Interestingly, reading the comments at AAR’s blog, I see several of the usual excuses: she couldn’t have known, she was young, she’s not profiting, perhaps she thought it was ‘public domain’, etc. (Update: oh, and I forgot, there’s the always popular “shaming the victim/blaming the messenger“)
To paraphrase one of my favorite characters: “You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means”
We–all of us–need to educate those around us about what is and isn’t plagiarism, what is copyright infringement, the differences and similarities between them, the ethical implications of plagiarism, etc. (I still recommend this handy primer by the SBTBs, by the way)
* * *
Finally, a word to Cindy Hoffman: not everything that is unethical is prosecutable: men do bleat and wail about these kind of things, both in public and in private, and bringing gender into the discussion does nothing but obscure the topic and derail the conversation.
RRRJessica
April 22
10:49 am
That wasn’t quite my question. For my part, I was struck that (a) many bloggers I read and enjoy in Romancelandia have been plagiarized, and , (b) they dealt with it by sending take down notices and moving on.
I guess it struck me how different this is from reaction to plagiarism of a romance author, in which case, in addition to any legal action, we all talk about it publicly.
I wasn’t trying to insinuate that plagiarizing a romance blog is on a par in some way with plagiarizing a published author, and I wasn’t trying to criticize or praise anyone. It’s just interesting to me on a purely intellectual level to wonder what’s different about stealing from a blogger (it even gets it’s own name, “scraped”) and why we deal with it differently.
Of course, now it is a couple of days later, and there is a lot more discussion in the blogosphere about the AAR situation, so my point about differences is probably moot!
Nadia Lee
April 22
11:04 am
Didn’t you know that women are only allowed to express vaguely pleasant thoughts? By breathing even a word about how she was victimized, one fails to uphold the all-important
vapidnesslovely feminine ideal. Violators must be shamed publicly and repeatedly. /sarcasmAztecLady
April 22
11:29 am
RRRJessica, I didn’t even know you were involved in the conversation; I read about it late Tuesday in another board. I see that now at least another blogger I read habitually has a post on the topic.
edited to add: I didn’t read all the comments at AAR, just the post–and the last one at the time–probably should have read them all before publishing this post, huh?
edited again: Jessica, I don’t know where you commented, I don’t see you at AAR or at Katiebabs’
Perhaps the difference between a well known romance author doing the plagiarizing (both Janet Dailey’s and Cassie Edwards’ books could–and still can–be found pretty much everywhere) and an almost unknown blogger is simply exposure?
But in the end, I do believe both acts are comparable: it’s theft, it’s fraud, it’s unethical whether it’s illegal/prosecutable or not.
Nadia Lee, yup.
Mireya
April 22
12:14 pm
What I’d like to know is when people will learn to stop trying to justify a crook’s behavior … specially after the said crook has been confronted about what he/she did wrong and the crook neither apologizes nor expresses that the content will be taken down.
I posted about it in my own little blog. It pisses me off on many levels. First as co-owner of a reviews newsletter and second as a reviewer myself, though I am mostly retired from that activity now. I don’t give pieces of crap the benefit of the doubt nor am I inclined to listen to lame excuses on their part. They are into it for 2 reasons: recognition that they envy from other popular blogs/review sites and the freebies … and I have no doubt whatsoever that she will do it again, next time being a little more careful not to get caught that easily. The fact that she didn’t even present a cursory apology and telling the people form AAR “I will remove the content immediately” tells you the kind of mentality this one has.
The internet provides the perfect means for that kind of unethical behavior: many free options for starting blogs or websites, heck you can even use a social network like Facebook, tons of “sources” to steal from, and anonymity. And no, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggesting that the internet should change, I take advantage of the same options, difference being the use of the word ETHICS. I do believe on a free internet, but that also means people like that little turd get to take advantage of it.
As to double standard, tell me who among everyone here that maintains a blog, has the time (and resources) to try and do something more than sending the standard “cease and desist” type of communication and maybe contact the site/blog hosting service to bring the offending or site blog down. Additionally, I think some may have grown a bit too accustomed to asshats behaving badly on the internet and maybe some people are taking things too much in stride.
Dhympna
April 22
12:34 pm
The plagiarist is not *that* anonymous. While she uses a screen name, her real name is also used in her profile and “about me” sections. I am somewhat doubtful that she has the temerity/courage to answer anyone publicly or via email.
Plagiarism always makes me cranky, but I do think it is an important topic for discussion.
The truth of the matter is, is that statistics show that most plagiarists are fully aware of what they are doing and simply do not believe that they will be caught, and if they are caught they believe naught will come of it. Which is why I believe that community discussion on this matter is very important.
RRRJessica
April 22
12:42 pm
Azteclady, I didn’t think you were referring to me in the post! The first line of my comment should have been “Speaking for myself, when I commented about this on Twitter I …”. Sorry!
I am still really surprised that this seems to be quite common, regardless of blog size or amount of traffic. At least 4 bloggers I follow on Twitter with really different audiences and amounts of traffic said it had happened to them. I had no idea!
AztecLady
April 22
1:07 pm
Mireya, I am convinced that plagiarists are always aware of what they are doing–a person cannot put down someone else’s words, verbatim and honestly think those words are his/hers.
Jessica, I think that one of the main problems with publicizing these thefts is this: if a perrson–particularly a woman–publicly complains about her intellectual property being stolen, they are call whiners, or that they are jealous, envious of the thief, and to shup up/grow up (from the NR/JD incident to CH’s comment at AAR, this is a stock response).
If a person, particularly a woman(women) publicizes instances of plagiarism that do not involve her personal property, someone asks whether the poor plagiarist ran over her dog (exhibit A, the SBTB/CE affair).
Not unlike rape victims, I understand why many would give up, so kudos to those who pull up their big girl undies and do something: make some noise, speak up, call attention to it.
SarahT
April 22
3:30 pm
I was baffled by some of the comments I read on Twitter regarding AAR being plagiarized. Some – not most – seemed very blasé about it. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more noise about this online given the amount of attention devoted to Cassie Edwards and the ferrets.
katiebabs
April 22
3:57 pm
There isn’t a big uproar because the blogger in questioned isn’t published versus the whole Cassie Edwards and Janet Daily plagariasim fiasco?
This blogger took word for word from a well respected website and excuse me, but what does her age have to do with anything? She is 23 and an adult in the eyes of the law. But then again, people wanted others to tone it down about Edwards because she was much older and the stress of being caught made her sick. Pfft.
I for one refuse to read Daily or Edwards after I learned about that. I guess you could say that’s my part.
It seems plagairism among the ya blogs have become a bit thing. And the ones doing it are high school age, where you are taught stealing someone’s work as your own is wrong.
This pisses me off because the amount of time and energy I put into my reviews, just as any reviewer does, is precious. And knowing that someone can come along with a click of the copy and paste button and take my hard work and claim it as their own enrages me.
Michelle
April 22
4:02 pm
When will people stop mixing up libel and slander?
Angela
April 22
4:08 pm
Hm…IMO, after former AAR reviewer Rachel’s unpopular comments in the rape blog post, I suspect a segment of the online population feels that AAR is unimportant. After all, when the website is brought up on today’s popular review blogs, there’s always a comment or two or more declaring that AAR is behind the times and populated by conservative, anti-intellectual, anti-blog readers.
Janet W
April 22
4:28 pm
What Sarah T said. Go back and look at the initial tweets … even the tenor of AZ’s initial remarks (and I understand that AZ enlarged them as she read more and my goodness, it’s not like the landscape isn’t changing rapidly) were authors = apples and blogs = bananas (my words) and how can the criticism even have been leveled?
From my perspective so what if Cassie is an apple and AAR is a banana: both entities are being pelted with rotten actions (fruit) and a little communal community empathy* “that’s a shame” wouldn’t have come amiss. But perhaps Angela is right (Angela the poster that juxtaposed AAR/unimportant/Rachel Potter).
* if that makes me a female whinger, guilty as charged. But in my defense, someone on twitter yesterday retweeted a comment (was it Don Linn?) about the secret of online nirvana and the word was CARE. Someone is going to the hospital, say something. Someone is going to the ball game, say you hope their team wins haha but I know what I’m trying to say. Someone has 70 freaking reviews lifted … well, you get my drift.
Janet W
April 22
4:55 pm
P.S. Azteclady, your points about the backlash SB received on Cassie Edwards are very well taken: I was horrified by CE’s actions and was thrilled by the teachable moment that emerged afterwards. All power to SB for making that story huge: there was no excuse. Nora Roberts said it all … stealing, wrong, no excuse … so please don’t infer that I don’t applaud everything they did to shine a spotlight on Edwards’ crimes. That is justifiably one of their proudest moments!
Marianne McA
April 22
6:16 pm
I thought it was odd that neither DA nor SBTB had mentioned it: I’d have thought it was the sort of thing they covered. I’m fairly sure DA had a post about the ‘DIK’ issue which was an AAR v. a blog kind of issue. If they covered that spat, you’d think they’d cover this – be good to flag the blog up as suspect to as many readers as possible, I’d have thought.
Perhaps it was mentioned in a post I didn’t read.
FD
April 22
6:56 pm
I could have sworn DA mentioned it in one of the link round up posts.
I was more upset by the Cassie Edwards thing, mainly because she’s a published author, profiting from the plagiarism. And the lack of acceptable response from her publisher didn’t help.
This doofus may have intended to profit from the plagiarism (arc getting strategy?) but so far appears to have been caught at an early stage. People plagiarise posts/meta/fanfic online all the time, so I guess I just wrote it off as yet another online crazy and made a mental note not to patronise the site.
Now, if it had been an established online ‘name’ reviewer pulling this bullshit, (I wonder what the reviewer equivalent of BNF is?) I would be a lot more outraged. Not that I mean to say her lack of renown is any defence for the offending blogger – there is no defence for plagiarism.
vein
April 22
7:49 pm
Blog plagiarism is common and non-influential–as mentioned about it is something most people online have dealt with dozens of times without needed the help of the torch-and-pitchfork brigade. I don’t see much of a comparison.
Melissa Blue
April 22
7:52 pm
Interesting yes there isn’t an uproar, but I think most uproars are something a lot of people can relate to and state in many different ways. The consensus is plagiarism is bad and shame on the person who does it. Unfortunately long comment threads stem from disagreement on an issue, not agreement.
Magdalen
April 22
7:57 pm
Here’s the concern I have. As a general rule (I don’t know about digital or self-publishing, for example), books are copyrighted in accordance with the US statute. That means someone has paid to register the copyrighted material with the Copyright Office. It also means that if a plaintiff sued an alleged infringer and won, there are statutory damages of many thousands of dollars per instance of infringement.
If your writings are not registered with the Copyright Office, you aren’t entitled to the statutory damages. You can still sue for the common law tort of copyright infringement, but as with most litigation, the plaintiff has the burden of proving money damages.
(I’m leaving aside the question of whether the infringer has any money with which to pay any damages, large or small.)
Most bloggers don’t register their sites with the Copyright Office. (I assume there’s a mechanism by which you register material that’s accruing daily or on a regular basis.) That means any legal effort to get an infringer to stop would be threatening a tort action — and where are the damages? AAR, for example, would have a hard time showing that they lost revenue because this putz copied some older reviews.
As with so many things, this makes this situation one that is not criminal, and not worth the prohibitive cost of initiating legal action to get the infringer to stop. Thus, there is less leverage than an author would have in a situation that is costing her actual sales.
Which brings us back to the question of community action. We can see who this individual follows on Twitter; the people she follows could block her. I agree that leaving comments on her blog — comments which get yanked, it would appear, in the moderation process — just elevates her traffic numbers. But we’ve done a pretty good job of exposing her actions to a good number of people.
About the concerns about allegations of defamation (which include both slander and libel) — remember that it’s very expensive to initiate any legal action. A blogger one can prove “stole” material from another website probably would probably have very little success with a defamation suit.
I still wouldn’t advocate name calling. This situation seems like a good one for shunning; if the community makes it clear that this blogger is not one to be trusted, that should limit her access to authors, ARCs, commenters, etc. It wouldn’t be defamatory to say we believe she in an untrustworthy reviewer.
Janet W
April 22
8:12 pm
@vein — my veins were popping a tad after I read your remarks, especially your reference to the “torch and ptichfork brigade”. Did I miss the memo? Is there a proper way to discuss people who steal content and pass it off as their own? ‘Cause guess what — this happens in business too: companies have work product stolen and the recourse is slim indeed. I know personally of a company that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get a) the action stopped b) an apology written c) for the offenders to admit their guilt in a letter to the company that they “fooled”. The aggrieved party didn’t make a cent from their actions but they were vindicated and they stood up for their principles.
But you know what, bring on the Angry Villagers — one of my favourite blogs of all time from AAR: http://www.likesbooks.com/blog/?p=4003
veinglory
April 22
8:36 pm
Um, I was being glib–that does tend to happen on blogs.
I am an active member of several anti-piracy initiatives. But I look after blog piracy solo because is is blindingly easy to get copy-blog deleted 99% of the time. That was my point. And I do it all without getting angry, it;s a waste of energy.
Dhympna
April 22
8:58 pm
Plagiarism is not necessarily the same thing as piracy.
Las
April 22
10:04 pm
I do think there is a difference between an author and a blogger plagiarizing. Not that there not both equally deserving of shame and shunning, but as far as the size of the resulting uproar, it makes total sense to me that not many seem to be reacting to the AAR news. Also, I’m personally not that interested in the topic…yes plagiarizing is wrong, you can bet I’ll never read the work of a known plagiarist, but it’s not an issue I’m going to spend much time commenting or reading about. (I first found SB when the whole Cassie Edwards thing broke it, and it turned me off the site for a long time because I found the endless discussions really boring.) It’s not like there’s a gray area to debate. Plagiarism’s bad, mmmkay?
Of course, another–and possibly bigger–issue is the blogger in question. It’s not like this woman was a well known reviewer. If this discovery had been made about DA, SB, Mrs. Giggles, etc., the shit would be flying all over the place. Now that I think about it, that would be a hell of lot more interesting to me than an author getting caught.
Shiloh Walker
April 22
10:30 pm
Okay, well, out of sheer curiousity, I just asked my 11 yr old… “If you picked up a book off my shelf and copied it word for word or copied it most and changed the words around just a little, and claimed the writing was yours, would that be wrong?”
her answer? “Yeeeeahhhh….”
Granted, she’s a writer’s daughter, and she also does some writing herself so she appreciates the work that goes into it, but still… if an 11 yr old can understand that it’s wrong…well, there ya go.
Dhympna said:
AGREED!
Nadia Lee said:
Sadly… yep, this mindset is very much still present and maybe that’s part of the issue.
I don’t have any problem speaking my mind on an issue, although I try to at least view all sides, and I try to be fair, but there are still plenty who think that “if you can’t say something nice…”
Sorry. That’s a form of censorship…not interested.
Now I gotta get…I’m off to my daily torture at the Y. Whimper. Sigh. Sob.
RikkiG
April 23
10:17 pm
What about using another author’s creations that she has been known all over the web for for years? I can’t think of any reason why another author would do that unless she couldn’t come up with something original of her own making. And not only use the idea but use the name? Is that right?
Anon76
April 24
5:22 pm
Magdalen said:
“I still wouldn’t advocate name calling. This situation seems like a good one for shunning; if the community makes it clear that this blogger is not one to be trusted, that should limit her access to authors, ARCs, commenters, etc. It wouldn’t be defamatory to say we believe she in an untrustworthy reviewer.”
I haven’t read all the materials, so I know nothing about the name calling issue, but…stealing another’s words is flat ass wrong. Doesn’t matter if it’s passages from other books (CE) or a review (AAR).
I know of one review site that makes their contributors sign a form before being allowed to participate. Included in the policy is that all reviews must be the original work of the participant and original content for the site. Also included is that if the review is posted by the particpant elsewhere, a nod must be given to the site in the byline.
If nothing else, it promotes the idea that word theft is not something to be treated lightly.
And back to Magdalen’s quote (finally) I agree that shunning is a good tool in most instances. For newbie “reviewers” (not that you could call this one that) I believe that not all of the thrill is from getting ARCs and free books. It’s the lure of possibly making personal contact with authors, especially their favs.
The shine is still on the apple, and the newbies don’t realize that authors aren’t Gods/Goddesses, but real people with everyday quirks just like anyone else. This reality hit me full force when I did my first signing at an RT convention. Some readers were looking at me in the same manner I looked at the other authors present.
So, if enough of a stink is made, and authors join in by not giving books to someone deemed unreliable, maybe this type of theft will slow. Good reviewers are part of an author’s life-blood, and I don’t think anyone should let them get hosed.
My more than 2 cents
Anon76
April 24
6:19 pm
Sigh. Okay I’m reading more up on this thing, and miss “Queen” has been found to have two more review sites.
Not looking good for giving the benefit of the doubt.
Shiloh Walker
April 24
6:43 pm
I’m wondering if the DMCA/Copyright issues apply to plagiarized reviews.
One would think-reviews are copyrighted, after all, right?
Dhympna
April 24
6:47 pm
@Shiloh
DMCA does apply. There is a form that Google provides for such cases. Reviews and blog posts do fall under copyright, regardless of whether or not it is stated explicitly. It is always best to assume that anything that is not antique (over 100 years old) has some sort of copyright.
Shiloh Walker
April 24
6:52 pm
That’s what I was figuring-so those who had the worked ripped off from AAR, or wherever else, can follow the DMCA takedown policy with google.