Young Author Faces 2nd Plagiarism Claim

[superconnected]

BOSTON - A Harvard sophomore's novel, pulled from the market last week after the author acknowledged mimicking portions of another writer's work, appears to contain passages copied from a second book.

A reader alerted The New York Times to at least three portions of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" that are similar to passages in the novel "Can You Keep a Secret?" by Sophie Kinsella.

While the plots of the two books are distinct, the phrasing and structure of some passages is nearly identical, the Times reported Tuesday.

In one scene in "Can You Keep a Secret," which was published by Dial Press, the main character, Emma, comes upon two friends "in a full-scale argument about animal rights," and one says, "The mink like being made into coats."

more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060502/ap_en_ot/young_author

[mainegreen]

1. How close do things have to be to be plagiarism?

If the examples in the article are the examples, I'd be hard pressed to call it plagiarism. Seriously, I know plagiarism is a big deal, but sometimes it seems that authors expect no one to draw from their work ever.

I'll never get writing.
:shrug:

[sendero]

2. To me ..

.... it would depend a lot on how extensively contexted the passages are. If the example given was part of a larger segment that all was similar, that would definitely be plagiarism. If they were mere sentences inside a context that didn't resemble the other book's context, it's not so clear is it :)

[Renew Deal]

4. You cannot use someone else's work

and not cite it. Plagiarism is the highest form of intellectual crime.

[AngryOldDem]

20. Something I've always wondered

A lot of hip-hop music (for lack of a better description), I've noticed, are blatant rip-offs of other songs. Currently, there is a song out by some woman that has the same rhythm as Soft Cell's Tainted Love, for instance. Other examples are the Police's "Every Breath You Take," and Queen's and David Bowie's "Under Pressure." The other day I was listening to a song on MTV and could not place where I had heard the melody before, until it hit me -- it was Supertramp.

What is the law on the issue of lifting someone else's music, and how does it really differ from plagiarism? To think that George Harrison got knocked for duplicating some chords on "My Sweet Lord" pales compared to the direct steals I hear today.

[Codeine]

21. Artists pay to use samples

Samples are little musical bits lifted from songs, like the bassline in "Under Pressure" by Queen being used as the basic beat for the Vanilla Ice hit, or when MC Hammer took a chunk of "Super Freak" and built "Can't Touch This" around it.

Sampling can often result in an artist receiving new money for an old song, and may even lead to the original song being renoticed. As long as permission is granted and royalties paid it's not a dishonest act, though many hip-hop artists -- especially in the past -- have used uncredited samples without permission and have been sued as a result. Recently a number of suits were filed against the record company and estate of the late Notorious B.I.G. for unauthorized use of samples from a number of 70s funk recordings.

[Bhaisahab]

6. amen bro

i hear you. there is a very thin line between plagiarism and inspiration. lets hope we can make out where the line is in the dank dungeons of creativity.

[ET Awful]

7. Derivative drivel maybe, but not plagiarism.

:)

[0007]

19. Self delete

[Tyrone Slothrop]

22. I don't think they have to be exact

Two factors here:

Firstly, in my experience -- and I majored in creative writing, FWIW -- it's incredibly rare to find two different writers who will phrase or voice things similarly. I have seen this in action. One of my professors gave us a subject for a story once; we were all to write a story about a hunter and a bear. 5000 words from twenty or so odd people and none of the stories were even remotely similar -- let alone containing similar or exact phrasing.

I think the odds of something like this are relatively small.

Secondly, considering the frequency of these occurrences, I think that plagiarism is fairly likely. There were something like 22 remarkably similar passages from the McCafferty books. Once is maybe a chance coincidence; multiple similarities among conversation topics and phrasing (syntax and diction as well as the duplicate yet inverted sentence structures) seem to indicate theft.

(Edited for a missing word.)

[mainegreen]

23. Interesting. Thanks!

I did not know that. I just seemed to me overlap would be common.

[henslee]

3. Bet if Harvard looked into her college papers, they'd find more plagiarism

I predict they will investigate and then yank her degree.

[superconnected]

5. So she steals ideas and words.

How sweet. If she doesn't quote exactly, she still takes.

I hope they investigate her college papers and oust her on her butt.

[REP]

8. She Also Plagarized Her Excuse from Helen Keller

Helen Keller had a book spelled into her hand, letter by letter, and a few years later, she wrote a book of her own that contained many passages lifted directly from that book. At the time, it was a huge scandal but even the author from who she mimicked agreed that it was not done intentionally. (This story itself is fascinating, as is Helen Keller herself - far from seeing herself as a model of disability, she was plagued by doubt about whether anything she said or wrote was her own or merely something she had internalized).

The woman in this story, however, cannot be held blameless as the deaf, blind and mute 12-year-old Helen Keller was.

[MrPrax]

9. Viswanathan book deal raises more questions

Hovering over the controversy around Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism-riddled novel is the $500,000 question: How could a publisher risk all that money on a 17-year-old who had only a bare concept and had never written a book?

The answer just might be found on the copyright page of ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." There it says: ''Copyright 2006 by Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan."

Alloy is the so-called book packager that helped the Harvard sophomore, now 19, develop the concept for her novel. Everyone involved insists she wrote every word, though Alloy president Leslie Morgenstein said in an e-mail that his firm ''helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book." Whatever the extent of its role, Alloy claimed half the rights, which according to publishing experts means that both Alloy and Viswanathan would have signed the contract.

Boston Globe

Good to see the media caught it before Oprah did :eyes:

[midnight armadillo]

10. This just gets better and better!

About 2 months ago the Boston Globe did a story on the 19 year old with a $500k contract. Oddly enough, she talks about having a huge urge to write and yet planned on becoming an investment banker. Hmm, maybe it was because she knew of her dishonesty and felt guilty?

Now we know she plagiarized freely, and owed half her contract to Alloy Entertainment (and another 15% to the lawyer that represented her AND Alloy!), a group that 'helped with plot ideas and editing.' It was the connection with Alloy that got her the big contract, they're a novel mill that puts out about 40 titles per year.

If I were one of her profs I'd be Googling every sentence in every paper she'd ever submitted. I am SO guilty of massive schadenfreude with this story.

[enlightenment]

13. Several software packages available now make the job

of catching plagiarism much easier for us. Unfortunately, it is very easy to catch most of the plagiarists, even without the specialized software -- unfortunate because it is so obvious that they not only think they can get away with it, but are too lazy to do it with any competence.

It is so sad to read a paper that opens with a barely coherent paragraph (to fit the assignment), moves to a well-organized and well-written body that has little or nothing to do with the initial thesis, and closes with another barely coherent conclusion (to fit the assignment). Sometimes, the student will insert paragraphs from different sources. Then, (assuming they realize the need) they will attempt to write transitional sentences. Ouch.

Or -- one of my personal favorites -- cutting and pasting from the internet without re-formatting the text so it matches. The "smart quote" (the 'curly quote') is the default in most word processors; basic html formatting uses the "straight quote" (like the one's here). An easy miss for most plagiarist and an easy catch for most teachers.

sigh.

What is most problematic is the difficulty of making students understand why it is inappropriate to plagiarize. Most of what I see is inadvertent, not deliberate -- and I give people a chance to correct their mistake. Still, there are a minority of student's who don't care. They just don't understand why it's a big deal.

When I started teaching, I included in my syllabus a two-paragraph definition of plagiarism and why it is wrong. I now spend a full class session discussing plagiarism; complete with worksheets and guides to simplify citation styles.

I honestly cannot say that it helps.

[Irreverend IX]

11. How original can this kind of book be, anyway?

I remember reading a story about alleged plagiarism among romance novel writers and thought the same thing. These teen soap opera novels are very similar to romance novels: both are commodities, pallets of bound paper sold by the ounce to readers who consume them and then line up at the supermarket register for another fix. A lot like porn tapes, come to think of it. I wonder what would happen if the XXX filmmakers started suing each other over who was the first to use the "meter man meets young woman sunbathing in the nude" plot device. When your genre is centered around telling the same story over and over again with slightly different window dressing each time, plagiarism comes with the territory.

[Dogmudgeon]

12. It doesn't make sense

It's a lot easier to write something yourself than to carefully piece another's work into your own ... right?

I've never gotten the "plagiarism thing". Maybe it's because I learned how to write early on, and clearly, but it always seemed to me that plagiarism was just an extremely difficult form of citation -- without the citation.

She's a Harvard student. She certainly has a brain, and probably has a moneyed family. So what's the deal?

--p!
The words like being made into other books.

[Onlooker]

14. Hard to be sympathetic to her

When she first got the $500K advance, the Boston Globe ran an article about her. She sounded pretty uninterested in writing, saying that she would probably be a stock broker or something like that. And, if I remember correctly, she didn't even seem particularly exceptional -- she wanted more to please heer parents than to be a writer. Then, supposedly her publisher hired a company that helped her outline and plan her books and gave her more than the usual amount of editorial support. She's just a spoiled fraud, I think, and the muses obviously turned her in.

[superconnected]

18. Kinda makes me wonder if she plagerized smth in H.S.

Got lauds and then her parents pushed her into writing where she could only plagerize more, to keep up with the bar.

Who knows.

Either way, I think she deservers every inch of the criticism she's getting.

[Buns_of_Fire]

15. Wait until the poor girl realizes I've copyrighted the word "the"...

...and that's not an original concept, either! Makes you wanna crawl back to the womb... Oops, I lifted that one from Sir Elton and Bernie! There's nothing new under the sun, after all. (Oops. Sorry Kal...)

I dunno. I hate to see it. I've always thought of myself as a collator, rather than an innovator. The trick, I think, is the set of filters that everything passes through betwixt the brain and the page -- and everyone has their own individual, personalized set of filters, free of charge. It's pretty lazy not to use them.

My (Which, BTW, is my current royalty for every ten times the word "the" has been used in all previous posts. Quantity discounts available.)

[WHAT]

16. Sounds like another gene being fobbed-off as a genius...

That's how I think of them...posers in public relation's prose. I'm so angry, I resent it. I used to really admire Harvard, and was thankful to them for eecummings, Lewis Thomas among the so many others. Now I'm disillusioned (Negroponte?), they may have jumped the shark. All of the ivy league for that matter. It's all turning-out to be the one third backwash from the two previous generations. Now we have performers; but, I don't think it's a class thing because a precedent set by ancestors may be a gift their progeny is uniquely able to pass on to the world. The precedent of example and behaviour, not position, is what seems important to me.

It must be hard to be a writer when you're in love with words and ideas and you have Kerouack and Dylan entangled in your synapses along with all the writers they had tangled-up in their mind and so on and so forth. Merit should be accorded the original, the originator, but sometimes self-appropriation through admiration clouds the mind. I understand that; but, a fake is a fake is a fake.

[Tansy_Gold]

17. Copyright infringement is always a matter of percentage

Plagiarism (the copying of another's work and claiming it as one's own) is not always or automatically illegal.

Copyright infringement is almost always illegal.

Infringement generally hinges on the amount of "copying" in the derivative work. If there were only one or two lines, no one is going to notice, literally. It's when there are lots and lots and lots of lines and passages and plot devices that seem to echo a previous work that a reader (or editor or critic) hits the buzzer and says, "Plagiarist!" (They really mean "Copyright infringer!" but that's too many syllables.)

Though I don't now, I used to make my living as a writer. While engaged in that profession, I became involved -- tangentially -- in three separate instances of copyright infringement. In two of those cases, the infringers saw their very successful careers go right straight down the toilet, as they deserved. In the third case, the infringed party declined to press charges, and the infringee continues to claim the work as her own. Don't ask me for details; it offends my blood pressure.

Copyright infringers -- and many, but not all, plagiarists -- are about as far beneath my contempt as boooosh-loving fascists.

May this little girl, who enjoyed the wealth that ought to have gone to a lot of much harder-working and far more honest writers, never write another word as long as she lives.


Tansy Gold, coming back from a nearly year-long DU hiatus