Plagiarism, or just 'mixing'?

A Berlin literary scandal poses the question – when everything is available free online, what is the meaning of copyright?
by: Robert McCrum

The news that a 17-year-old Berliner, Helene Hegemann, has run into a storm of abusive publicity over the authenticity of her cult teen bestseller Axolotl Roadkill looks like another of those plagiarism rows that surface from time to time in the European press. See, for instance, my recent Observer article about novelist Marie Darrieusecq's bitter feud with Camille Laurens.

But this one is, I think, more complicated than usual. Of course, at one level, there are passages in Hegemann's gritty exploration of the Berlin nightclub scene in the aftermath of her mother's death that are plainly lifted wholesale from another novel, Strobo, the work of a German blogger who goes under the name of Airen.

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it's clear from the reports I've read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she's done is no more than "mixing" (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

It may be unwise to pronounce on a German literary scandal. But it does seem to me that, in a naive way, Hegemann is simply following a line of argument that is gaining momentum at the moment, especially in California: when everything is available free online, what is the meaning of copyright?

If you come, as most adult readers still do, from an established print culture, then copyright is the bedrock of the European intellectual tradition. But if you have come of age outside that cultural inheritance, or at odds with it, then you are likely to claim, as Hegemann reportedly puts it, that "Berlin is here to mix with everything".

In this context, which cannot be ignored, plagiarism is just one part of the literary contract that may now be up for renegotiation in Google-world. Some will say, with Cavafy, that "The barbarians are coming." I don't take that line, but I think the renegotiation is increasingly urgent.

From: Guardian