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Is Plagiarism In Literature Just Sampling?
ardent99 writes "According to the NY Times today, Helene Hegemann's first book has been moving up the best-seller list in Germany and is a finalist for a major book prize. While originally this was notable because Hegemann is only 17 and this is her first book, and so earned praise as a prodigy, what's interesting now about this story is that she has been caught plagiarizing many passages in the book. Amazingly, she has not denied it, but instead claims there is nothing wrong with it. She claims that she is part of a new generation that has grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art, and this is legitimate in modern culture. Have we entered a new era where plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal? Is this the ultimate in cynicism, or is it simply a brash attempt to get away with something now that she's been caught? Is her claim to legitimacy compromised by the fact that she only admitted it after it was discovered by someone else? And finally, if 'sampling' is not acceptable in literature, is this reason to rethink the legitimacy of musical sampling?"
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
People usually add some music/lyrics of their own over sampled sounds, too. Does the book have layered text on top of each page? ;)
She claims that she is part of a new generation that has grown up with mixing and sampling in all media, including music and art, and this is legitimate in modern culture
If she said that upfront - before all this blew up... then perhaps she might have a legitimate point. But after the fact is smacks of ignorance, laziness and a protozoan intellect pretending to be great.
As someone who is only slightly older than she is. Yes, this is plagiarism. I'm TAing now and if a student handed in something like this we'd fail her. No question. They might even go in front of a disciplinary committee and certainly would if this were not the first time.
This is also a gross abuse of copyright. I'm not talking about the evil "oh this has been copyrighted for 70s years" copyright, or even using copyright for non-commercial uses. This is classic copyright violation for her own commercial use. That's precisely what sensible copyrights prevent you from copying. And it isn't like these are short enough passages that there's even any real remixing but rather long sections and the like.
The fact that she didn't acknowledge the sources makes the whole thing all the more egregious and shows that she really probably knew what she was doing was wrong. If not, she was so ignorant that it didn't occur to her that this might be a problem. Either way, it is deeply unimpressive.
We have sampling in literature already. It's called citation and quotation. Helene Hegemann took someone else's work and presented it as her own, which I find disingenuous. Had she come out when she released the book and said she "collaged" works for the book that would have been one thing. That concept would have made for an interesting critique on a different media for "mash-ups". I do not personally view what she did as mixing and expanding upon an idea in the same concept of a mashup because she lacked the openness to express what her intention was. pwnies really sums up my opinion, with an excellent point of reference (Girl Talk).
Well I guess I am not from her Generation but sampling started when I was in my early 20s. If done correctly in music it is like a collage and it is a new piece of art.
When done wrong it is theft.
I am thinking of Ice Ice Baby as a good example of done wrong.
In this books case I would say it is theft from the story "In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes."
Dude that isn't sampling that is a cover!
Or to put another way. Every generation at 17 thinks that the world is a totally different place from the one their parents lived in. By the time we hit 35 we all start to think man it probably really wasn't. And at 40 we all start saying What the hell where we thinking when we where 17. What idiots we where but it sure was fun.
So no she is just another dumb 17 year old that thinks the rules don't apply anymore because things are so different.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Indeed: in writing, one commonly samples other people's work using a moderately well-known process called "quoting". I'm mildly surprised she hasn't heard of it.
In quoting, one marks the material quoted with either in-line or block quotes, and lists the source, usually at the bottom of the page in something called a "footnote" (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The difference between bands like Girl Talk who sample music to create new pieces, and someone copying someone else's words into a paper they're writing, is that Girl Talk doesn't claim to have made the samples. One of the aspects of why plagiarism is seen as wrong is because you're taking credit for someone else's work. When you're sampling music, you're crediting them.
Agreed. Often, sampled sounds are clearly recognizable as they are intended to bring an association from the original material: take something everyone knows, twist it, shuffle with other sounds, and make something new. The artists are not trying to hide the origin of their samples, but paying homage to them. Indeed, there is a long-standing history of one artist performing works by another, adding their own touch to the music. Furthermore, when that happens and the second artist makes money at it (sometimes even when they don't), they have to pay royalties to the first artist.
Unattributed lifting without manipulation is not the same. Didn't we just have an article earlier today about cheating in CS classes at Stanford? It's not just illegal, it's unethical.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Non-fiction readers would disagree on quoting being distracting. Lifting an entire page is hardly sampling. It outright theft.
Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.
Nothing that is against the law or otherwise a violation of a property right is always a "bad thing".
No form of stealing is always bad. Trespassing isn't always bad. Neither is copyright infringement. Neither is outright theft. But in each instance, you impinge on someone's inherent and exclusive rights (otherwise known at law as "property"), and the adult thing to do is to face the consequences of that action and pay the price.
Take trespassing, for example. Unless you're stomping on some prized and rare flowers, it causes no harm to anyone and permanently deprives the owner of the land of nothing. And yet, it remains unlawful because the owner of the land has the sole right to authorize admission onto it, whether it would be reasonable to deny entry or not, or whether he charges for admission at a reasonable rate or not. If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them.
Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful. It doesn't have to be reasonable, and the trespass might have been economically efficient or otherwise better than the alternative.
Taking food without paying when you're about to starve isn't a bad thing. But then turning and claiming you did nothing wrong is. You did what you had to do, and that will be considered in sentencing. You'll pay for the food that you took (restoring the tangible), and you will pay for the injury you caused to the food's owner by taking it without permission.
With copyright infringement, you pay for the injury, your depriving the owner of his exclusive property rights. That can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars (less than damages for trespassing) to many thousands, depending on the seriousness of your violation and the value of the work. Yes, there should be a cap on damages for private citizens infringing without commercial gain, but no, there should be no exception for arguing that your breach of law was a net positive. It often is with property crimes and impingement.
The law protects the rights of owners to maintain the freedom to make determinations on the use of their property. When an owner decides to sell some of those property rights, he has the right to determine at what price and under what conditions to do so, constrained only by other laws limiting his choice.
People are never required to do what's best with what they own. They're free to be as stupid, generous, savvy, greedy, or unreasonable as they wish, within the confines of the law.
Because, as many others pointed and will point out, the plagiarist is taking credit on originality that belongs to somebody else.
It's not bad just because it's been ruled to be bad. It's bad because plagiarism allows anyone to do a quick search in "obscure" literature, pick up some particularly interesting piece and resell it as being his own original work. It's great for the plagiarist, may be good to the public, but not so for the original creator.
You can be informative and entertaining over other people's work, as long as you give them credit.
You don't need to claim authorship to be entertaining.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
She didn't fess up until she got busted, didn't she? And that's the only reason why the other book is being bought, ain't it?
Was she saying she planned to get busted all along? The lying twit.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
I don't think that there always has to to be a citation. I can think of a couple of situations in which it wouldn't be necessary, at least not morally (I won't touch legal issues).
There's no need to credit a "sample" is brief and of something sufficiently well-known to the intended audience. This is extremely common in poetry and has been since antiquity. For example, if I begin my poem about a romance between two pine borer beetles with the line "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood", I don't need to mention Robert Frost because everyone likely to read it sees what I'm doing. Obviously the line between obvious and not-obvious is a fuzzy one and depends on the audience, but it's a good general guideline.
I also think that a work that is very obviously built of "samples" needn't expressly say what is what. I'm thinking here of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, which consists in part of passages lifted directly from a wide variety of sources (it's the first place I'd ever seen Nathaniel Hawthorne on the art of sculpture used to discuss Mao). I don't remember if Tuten credits his "samples" or not, so it might be a bad example, but in a work like that, which is clearly and expressly made up in large part of words not originally written by the author, part of the game is in trying to figure out who originally wrote what, and what part is pastiche or parody instead of quotation.
The key is that in neither of the above cases is the author trying to pass of someone else's work as his own. Hegemann pretty clearly was, and now is just making stuff up to try and get away with it.
The simple fact is that plagiarism does not exist. Only in the academic world does the concept exist. In the real world, plagiarism itself is perfectly legal, and at worst is a moral/ethical failing.
Copyright infringement is what matters in the real world, and is orthogonal to plagarism. For example, it is not actually plagiarism to publish somebody else's work in its entiretly as the majority of a new work, as long as the original atuhor is credited. (One may still be failed in a class for doing so, as the assignment would quite likely fail the requirements, but that is a separate issue). But it very well may be copyright infringement to do so. On the other extreme, it is plagiarism to use somebody else's arguments, even if you completely rewrote them. However that would not be copyright infringement, since copyright only covers the expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
Perhaps definitions would help show this: Plagiarism is "using somebody else's ideas without acknowledging the source.
Copyright infringement is "using somebody else's expression of an idea without permission and in excess of the fair use or equivalent exceptions".
Now this book in questions sounds like it has plagiarism if the source of borrowed ideas was not mentioned on an acknowledgments page or similar location. It might also be copyright infringement, regardless of any crediting, since specific expressions of ideas were re-used without permission. Only the latter is actually a problem. Crediting the idea sources would be nice, but the law does not require it.
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Books and maps were originally allowed to be copyrighted for 16 years as this was viewed as necessary to help people recoup their costs of production, newspapers, handbills, plays, and music were not allowed copyright protection.
With on demand publishing the cost of publication is essentially covered by the purchaser, negating the original rational for copyright protection for books.
If the point of copyright protection is to increase the number of works available to the public, in both quantity of titles and the availability of those works, it would seem like the only form of work that requires substantial investment, in 2010, is movies. Most other things can be done with a capital expense of a $300US computer and an internet connection.
With two hundred years of tweaking copyright law there has become a perception of rights of creators. While this may be a worthwhile endeavor to purse such an objective, it has never been openly made, but rather stuck in the back door.
Claiming credit for something someone else did is slander under certain circumstances, and there is a lot to be said for truthful acknowledgement of creation, but a creative work is generally more than the sum of its parts, and the pro copyright supporters seem to be failing to acknowledge that copyright as it is currently implemented causes a great number of works to be unavailable to the general public, in direct opposition to the intent of granting copyright, and the pro copyright supports do not seem to be answering this rather important question. — How is copyright helping create more books in todays world where we have word processes on almost every desk, and multiple printing on demand services?
Work bio at MMWD
A mutt can be an excellent dog even if it doesn't have any papers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Neither art nor music should have any position about plagiarism. Plagiarism is for academics whose need for acknowledgment overwhelms their desire to further their own and society's knowledge, and those who care more about their bank account than producing something of value. While it seemed distasteful to me at first, Bowie, Mercury, and Van Halen were all exposed to new audiences when they were sampled, and I truly believe they were better off for being sampled. Jazz, Blues, and Rock and Roll would not exist without constant borrowing and even stealing. The best music in the world was created when everyone was stealing from everyone else in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Would Hendrix have been as big if he hadn't covered a folk song, All Along the Watchtower? Would Zeppelin, the Stones, or Clapton have been so big without such obviously stolen blues songs and riffs? Did Dylan suffer from Jimi's cover? No, his fan base grew. Did all the Blues musicians suffer? No, in fact many were likely saved from obscurity, for at the time no 'decent' white folk would listen to such music. I think it axiomatic that the more selfish you are, the more yourself and the world suffers. The more generous you are, the more yourself and the world benefits.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF