posted
Apparently, Google Book Search is now allowing people to waste, (sorry, judgement), their time "busting" the literary pillars of the paste for plagiarism.
What's interesting to me about my own reaction to this article is that I don't really care about "hardcore plagiarism." I believe it does happen, and I believe it is a bad thing, but if you read to the end of this article, Paul Collins seems to be rooting for a major literary figure, pick a name any name, to be busted, like it's a football game and one of them is going to be caught out on a foul.
Then there's this side of my problem with it: the modern, western idea of intellectual property could, in the future, be boiled down to an author's use of similar or identical language in ANY part of ANY written work. Poets and authors, songwriters and musicians, politicians, teachers, and everyone else, quote great lines off-hand ALL THE TIME. T.S. Eliot, broken down, looks like one major project in the art of literary collation. But that isn't what's going on, and what Eliot did is not plaigarism. I even venture to say that the proof of Stern's "plagiarism" in a rant about plagiarism itself, could be nothing more than proof of an idiosyncratic sense of humor.
Are we to expect that all works of prose will now contain nothing but entirely unique sentences? Or are we as writers now expected to worry that we might be thinking about something clever someone clever once said somewhere, about something... oh yes! And then we use it, and then we're busted?? Really??
The thing is, I know right from wrong (I hope) but I don't trust the Googlites to understand something like this, or even care about the literature they are "investigating." Meh, I am being curmugiony. Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
It all depends on your definition of plagiarism. IMO it's only plagiarism if an author knowingly uses somebody else's words and then refuses to acknowledge the original source. Try and prove such circumstances when the people in question have long since passed on.
If all prose would from now on only contain completely original sentences, it would quickly become a collection of absurdisms. As an example I refer to George Carlin's 'original sentence' which had something to do with gauging out ones own eyeballs and then inserting a red hot poker up ones behind. (If memory serves me, then you can find this on Carlin's album Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics)
And just to be a nitpicking jerk: shouldn't it be curmudgeony?
Plagiarist: one who helps to preserve what is best.
Posts: 993 | Registered: Jul 2006
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I'm supposed to get worked up because the author couldn't find, "It seems to me that it should not be unusual" on the internet? I'm supposed to get worked up because some unnamed passage he could have misremembered showed up in a couple other places, too?
If you find out that Shakespeare's immortal lines were ripped off, let me know. If my favorite wordy rants from Adams or Bradbury were stolen, then I might care. Some random line somewhere being similar to someone else's does not impress me.
How much of what someone writes is a great line and how much is filler to get from point A to point B?
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
"Melencholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson (1983 Hugo Short Story winner) is an interesting story dealing with possible consequences of the continuation of Western intellectual property laws.
posted
I understand that it's a problem, but I agree with Elmo... it is impossible to imagine a situation in which every sentence anyone writes forever will be entirely original. This is ridiculous. There were ways to research other works prior to Google Book Search, and there will continue to be others. This does not mean that people's writing needs to be restricted to sentences that no other person has ever come up with.
And remind me to put "It seems to me that it should not be unusual" in the next book I write.
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
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