Wednesday, April 9, 2014

The big steal: the rise of the plagiarist

by: Rhodri Marsden

It's not that hard to think of something totally original. If you don't worry about it being any good, it's easy. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," was Noam Chomsky's spirited attempt in his ground-breaking 1957 book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures. "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers," was Stephen Fry's during an episode of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. But when novelist John Gardner used the phrase "opening the throttle at the last moment" in his 1983 book Icebreaker, it's unlikely that he sat back and congratulated himself on being the first to have written it. Innovation wasn't what he was aiming for, after all; he was just trying to describe someone driving a scooter. But Google Books, that vast indexing project, informs us that Gardner's was the only book to contain this phrase until another, Vestige Of Evil by Len Vorster, appeared on Amazon in 2011. A section of the novel, one of two books self-published online under that name, featured other phrases that were no longer unique to Icebreaker, such as "the ice and snow were not as raw and killing as this" and "the slope angling gently downwards to flatten". The many coincidences were startling, though if it wasn't for the internet, nobody need ever have known.

In fact, if it wasn't for the internet, there might never have been a Vestige Of Evil. Vorster (not the Australian concert pianist of the same name, and most likely a nom de plume) appears, like millions of others, to have been inspired by the sheer quantity of online content and the new opportunities for digital self-expression. With a potential audience of billions, the prospect of contributing can be thrilling; meanwhile, the moral responsibility we traditionally attach to creative expression has been downgraded by the sheer ease of copying someone else's work. When Richard Condon lifted sentences wholesale from Robert Graves' I, Claudius and quietly stuck them into The Manchurian Candidate, he did it the good old-fashioned way. Today, technology covertly assists us: ctrl+C to copy images, prose, code, video and more, ctrl+V to paste. The consequences of this can range from sly postings of other people's witticisms on Twitter in pursuit of retweet glory, to print-on-demand books that are merely duplicates of other books. Driven by a combination of greed, confusion, ignorance, pressure, laziness and ambition, an increasing number of people are looking at stuff other people have done and thinking, "Wow. That's really good. I'll pretend that I did it."


Justin M Damiano, a story by American comic artist Daniel Clowes, was published in 2008 as part of a collection of 23 short stories entitled The Book Of Other People. It told the tale of a film critic experiencing an internal struggle over whether or not to review a film positively, and it may have languished in relative obscurity had the storyline and dialogue not been used by actor-director Shia LaBeouf in a short film entitled Howard Cantour.com, which received its online premiere last December. The similarities between the two were quickly noted, as was the absence of any acknowledgment of Clowes' work; by effectively pretending it was his own story, LaBeouf had committed what American judge Richard A Posner describes in his book The Little Book Of Plagiarism as "the capital intellectual crime". Intellectual, because there's no law against plagiarism. Sure, copyright violation is a prosecutable offence, and Clowes' lawyer immediately pursued LaBeouf's for a response on that score. But copyright eventually expires, and even if Clowes had been dead for 200 years, LaBeouf would still have stood accused of plagiarism. It was that moral offence, the act of passing off someone else's work as your own, that caused a familiar tsunami of offence to roar across social media channels.

Justin M Damiano story
The Justin M Damiano story used by Shia LaBeouf for his short film. Image: (c) Danial Clowes
"It's a problem for me, it really is," says Edward Champion, managing editor of an American blog, Reluctant Habits, which has frequently expressed contempt for plagiarists. He expounds at length on the subject, relishing his rhetoric. "When you see someone desecrate this wonderful, noble medium by not being assed to try to find a new form of expression," he says, "it's basically a writer signalling utter contempt for the reader. The plagiarist, to me, is the kind of irredeemable hood that would take bad writing to a ne plus ultra level."

It's an opinion shared by British thriller writer Jeremy Duns, whose work in exposing and publicising cases of written theft has earned him something of a reputation as a plagiarist's scourge. "When I was in my 20s," he says, "I was one of the editors at a magazine for English-speaking expats in Belgium, a kind of Time Out wannabe. I found out by pure chance that our film reviewer had plagiarised all his reviews from IMDb [the Internet Movie Database] for years. But even though it was verbatim plagiarism, the editor hadn't really wanted to sack him. I was shocked. If you're really annoyed by something and people say, 'Oh no, it's not wrong at all', then you get even more annoyed. So I tend to be like a dog with a bone."

The act of uncovering and investigating acts of plagiarism is becoming easier by the day. Search engines, online plagiarism checkers (of varying quality) and the viral publicity opportunities afforded by social media all play their part. Plagiarism searches can be compelling, like addictive puzzles where positive results elicit mental fist-pumps of delight. (It's unlikely that the unwieldy phrase "mental fist-pumps of delight" will be plagiarised, but I've set up a Google Alert in case.) Still, it's laborious, unpaid work. "It takes discipline," Champion says. "You have to sit for hours looking through documents, and it can be a tedious task." The act of proving plagiarism can also be unnerving, according to Duns, not least because getting it wrong exposes you to legal action for defamation. "You open yourself up to a certain amount of abuse," he says. "It's a lot easier to leave it all alone. And sometimes I do try to leave it alone," he adds. But both men seem independently driven by their displeasure. "What keeps us going," Champion says, "is what we're going to discover."

These searches aren't restricted to words; content-based image retrieval – ie, searching for images using the image itself – has been crucial in exposing cases of photographic plagiarism. Nearly every professional photographer has a story about their copyright being violated, but that violation can also blur into plagiaristic acts, where photographers simply pretend that other people's work is theirs. Corey Ann, a wedding photographer based in Ohio, was appalled when she heard of a photographer advertising their services on Groupon in 2010 using someone else's work, and she became involved in exposing it. "Afterwards," she says, "people started coming to me when they found out their work was being used. I needed a place to put it all, to show who was doing it and who was affected by it." The result was stopstealingphotos.com, which documents as many cases as Ann has time to publish. Other websites, such as logothief.com, which exposes the work of designers who have been, shall we say, a little overinspired by others, fulfil a similar function. "If these things are in a central location that everyone can see," Ann says, "it has more impact. It draws attention to what's happening, and hopefully it deters people from doing it."

But while Ann keeps her fingers crossed, the temptation to use other people's work is growing as the volume of it expands. We're in new territory, a confusing online landscape that more than one person I interviewed for this piece described as "difficult". For millennia we have absorbed information, mentally processed it, stored it, retrieved it and passed it on in a slightly altered form and context; now, our unprecedented exposure to that information makes it convenient to take short cuts. Video and audio mash-ups are commonplace; an artist such as Girl Talk receives widespread praise for his (carefully credited) plunderphonics. News outlets report the publication of news in other outlets as news. Code is endlessly nicked and recycled without anyone really noticing. "There's a lot to take on board about being in the digital world," says Vicky Beeching, a writer and broadcaster whose doctoral research focuses on the ethics of online technology. (I took the second half of that last sentence directly from her website; rewriting it just seemed unnecessary.) "It comes with a heck of a lot of issues," she continues, "including how we delineate between our own ideas and other people's, whether we should be bothered about it."

Monica Gaudio was bothered about it. Her recipe for a 14th-century apple pie, published on the medieval cookery website godecookery.com, was copied, tweaked and pasted into Cooks Source, an American food magazine, in late 2010. Her name was mentioned on the page, and the incident may have passed as an unremarkable violation of copyright were it not for the email that Gaudio received from editor Judith Griggs in reply to her complaint. "Honestly, Monica," she wrote, "the web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses and the workplace." By crediting Gaudio, Griggs may not have plagiarised in the fullest sense, but she was telling her unwitting contributors to be grateful for this. Gaudio circulated the email, and the outrage was colossal; Cooks Source was forced to close. "It was really venomous and vulpine," Champion says. "And people reacted strongly because they knew there was an underlying power dynamic in play." It was the familiar tale of the big guy exploiting the little guy.
Tatty Devine necklace
Rosie Wolfenden MBE is the co-founder of the much-pirated jewellery company Tatty Devine. "When we started, we felt like we were the only people in the world doing what we do. Today you can see everyone else who's doing it.' Photograph: Tattydevine.com
While bottles of knocked-off perfume on market stalls raise few hackles, if a market trader complained that their idea had been ripped off by Calvin Klein, you can guarantee there'd be an online petition up and running by lunchtime. While this comes more under the banner of piracy than plagiarism, many big businesses, including Tesco, M&S, Urban Outfitters and Claire's Accessories, have found themselves accused of it. Rosie Wolfenden MBE, co-founder of the much-pirated jewellery company Tatty Devine, has seen how this predatory behaviour has affected young designers who are desperate to showcase their wares but simultaneously terrified of doing so. "It's the number one concern that we hear about," she says. "When we started, pre-broadband, we felt like we were the only people in the world doing what we do. But today, if you do a quick search, you can see everyone else who's doing it. It feels like it's impossible to have an original idea, and designers are almost taught to be anxious, because they're being advised not to show anyone their work." The intense pressure to make money or generate new content has resulted in a kind of frantic laziness and vigorous corner-cutting. "It's not that weird if a journalist is pushed for time and they take a sentence off Wikipedia," Duns says, before stopping himself and reasserting his exasperation. "But LaBeouf… he took that film to Cannes! Just think about that. He must have had caterers, sound people, light people – who can go through all that and not at any point think that someone is going to realise?"
Shia LaBeouf
Shia LaBeouf has attempted to style himself as a crusading postmodernist in the wake of his plagiarism scandal. But he is no Laurence Sterne or Jonathan Swift. Photograph: Rex
LaBeouf's motivations are certainly harder to pin down and more psychologically interesting. Most creative people have a wistful yearning for self-improvement, an almost draining need to be seen to better themselves. Posner describes how they experience "belatedness… a feeling that the niche [they] might have filled has been filled already". But that pressure to matter, whether real or imagined, seems to be exacerbated by the internet, and by social media in particular. We feel compelled to say something, urgently, but we have no idea what to say, so we repurpose, we borrow and, at worst, we plagiarise.

At its most extreme, it can become almost pathological, compulsive behaviour. When the 2011 spy novel Assassin Of Secrets, written under the pen name QR Markham, was discovered shortly before British publication to be an elaborate patchwork of several other spy novels (including, again, John Gardner's Icebreaker), its American author Quentin Rowan admitted he had been preposterously self-destructive. "It's so hard to explain logically or rationally," he told Jeremy Duns. "I can only compare it to other kinds of obsession or addictive behaviour like gambling or smoking… I knew it would destroy me, [but] it did something for me in the moment."

Champion puts it this way: "When you're published, you raise yourself to a position of power. If you feel that you can get away with it, having bamboozled some of the finest minds in the business, what's going to stop you carrying on?"
Icebreaker novel
Phrases from Icebreaker appear in two other books: Assassin of Secrets and Vestige of Evil
It's a good question. The courts, as we've established, don't deal with plagiarism, and suing a plagiarist for breach of copyright is unlikely to be lucrative. The most punitive action available is publicly to humiliate the perpetrator, an option that citizens of Twitter and Facebook seize eagerly. Following the plagiarism accusations, Rowan found himself subjected to what he describes as an "almost ultraviolet level of anger", and for that reason declined to be interviewed for this piece. "It was never my intention to make some kind of statement," he emailed. "What I did absolutely and in every way ruined my life… Now I can see how miraculously fragile it all is, I can't risk jeopardising anything." But it's important to note that Rowan had many defenders, who praised the skill involved in the creation of Assassin Of Secrets. One writer, Chauncey Mabe, saluted him as a "courageous new kind of artist" whose work should be "embraced, rather than withdrawn". LaBeouf also attempted, some would say in desperation, to style himself as a crusading postmodernist in the wake of the Howard Cantour.com affair, plagiarising his own apology from, of all places, Yahoo Answers. But he's not a Laurence Sterne or a Jonathan Swift; people still hate LaBeouf for what he did.

Creative people are constantly chasing new ideas. "I'm sitting in my study, desperately trying to think of original ways of saying things," Duns say. "If someone takes them without acknowledgment, I don't think that it's a clever piece of art. But the sad thing is that it's probably becoming part of our culture."

Whether Duns' fears come to pass depends largely on the capricious whims of a younger generation. The evils of plagiarism may be drilled into university students, with threats that their work will be checked by that all-seeing-eye of academic fraud, turnitin.com. But, as Beeching points out, the learning process itself is also being radically reshaped, to a point where the notion of plagiarism is becoming foggier, and not one that's automatically synonymous with cheating. "Students don't need to store information in their brains any more," she says. "I recently read someone refer to the internet as our 'outboard brain', and now it's surely a question of making a difference in the world by applying that pool of resources."

As I have read and then subsequently written about plagiarism, scribbling down notes as I go, I have almost inevitably been plagued by doubt as to whether I am having my own ideas or merely expressing other people's in a different way. But maybe that's an anxious by-product of my desire to have my own ideas; the plagiarist, meanwhile, nearly always makes a conscious decision to plagiarise, and by doing so is taking what is largely deemed, at least for the moment, to be the easy way out. "Sometimes, in life and in art, you have to make the difficult choice," Champion says. He's been trying to tell me why plagiarism is wrong, but tails off mid-sentence as he struggles to express his strength of feeling. "And that difficult choice," he concludes, almost triumphantly, "is sometimes finding a way to grapple with a difficult expression of an idea using one's heart and one's courage." Later, out of mild curiosity, I tap these words of Champion's into Google Books and press "search". It turns up nothing.

from: Guardian

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