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.
"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.
 |
| 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 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?"
 |
| 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.
