posted
The plagiarism sheet handed out at all my classes gave rise to this question:
Is it possible for a writer to plagiarize his/her own work?
I'll try to show what I mean with an example:
A writer completes a short story and gets it published in a magazine. The writer receives payment for the short story.
Later, the writer expands upon the short story to complete a novel. The novel contains a large amount of text that is identical to that of the short story (say 2 pages).
The author then gets the novel published by a different organization than the short story.
posted
Disclaimer: I AM NOT A LAWYER and what follows is only general comment, not legal advice.
Any answer depends on the rights the writer sold to the magazine. If they sold the story complete with copyright (which is rare, and not recommended), then this scenario could give rise to a case of plagiarism, as the copyright would now be owned by the magazine, and the author would need the copyright holder's permission to republish the material in the novel.
If the magazine edited the material prior to publication, then they may have copyright in their edit, and the author might need their permission to reproduce the edited version in the novel.
If the rights sold to the magazine were exclusive and any time limit had not expired before the material was republished, the author could also be in breach of contract.
posted
oh, I think you're completely right, and probably the original question would have better been phrased as "what are the legal implications of reusing a previously published short story as part of a novel?"
posted
Don't confuse plagiarism with copyright infringement. Plagiarism is to use someone else's work or ideas, and pass it off as your own. You can NOT plagiarize yourself. Copyright infringement is to publish (in any of its meanings) someone else's work without their permission and without paying them whatever fee is required. In this case, "someone else" means, not the creator of the work, but the person who owns the copyright. So, if you own the copyright, you can't really infringe upon it. However, you can infringe on the holder of the copyright of work which you created, if you've sold that copyright to a magazine, for instance.
In any case, borrowing from one of your works and reusing it in another is a time-honored tradition, to which no moral blame should be ascribed--so long as you don't do it so much as to start boring your readers, which is of course an unforgivable sin. (Isn't there a thread around here somewhere about Robert Jordan?)
posted
Larry Niven's short story "Rammer" appears in its entirety in the novel A World Out of Time; the novel is an expansion of the story. I am sure this was legal because the mag that bought "Rammer" bought and used its First North American Serial Rights, and then the author could do what he wanted.
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
The only circumstances I could envisage where an author could plagiarise themselves would be where they no longer owned the copyright to a work they had created. Hence I only looked at that aspect.
Posts: 245 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
The described situation isn't plagiarism, it's cannibalization. A writer takes one or more of his shorter works and reworks them (and sometimes rewrites them) into a larger work.
Noted recent example: Silverberg's "The Alien Years." Read it and see how many older Silverberg stories you can spot entombed within.
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