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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?"
Artists who sample should always give the original artist credit... This is a childish attempt to explain, or rather justify, a wrong AFTER the fact.
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.
Actually, the Verve did license that sample but lost in court anyway (the owner of the original recording thought they used "too much" of the sample, and the court agreed. I still find it to be incredible BS, the string loop isn't that long. Their real complaint was that the song became a hit and the lawyers smelled money). So the real lesson is "music industry people will screw you"
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).
In the United States, since 1991, the date of Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., music samples need to be cleared by the copyright holder. That's what seems to be the real distinction here- you cannot consider literary plagarism to be analogous to music sampling because in fact legal music sampling is nothing like plagarism- works are cited, permission is requested and granted and often a considerable sum of money or share of future earnings takes place.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
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.