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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.
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).
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
Non-fiction readers would disagree on quoting being distracting. Lifting an entire page is hardly sampling. It outright theft.
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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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