Is Plagiarism In Literature Just Sampling? 449
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?"
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you sample music to make your own song, you'd better credit properly and pay or else the original songwriter will end up owning your song. The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony is a classic example of that. The music behind the band is a remix of The Rolling Stone's "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and since they didn't license and credit that, The Stones now get 100% of the royalty payments for that song.
Childish (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Definitely Not (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on how you define plagiarism. At the university I attended, making a mistake in the format of your references was considered plagiarism. I wouldn't personally hold anyone to that high if a standard. Did she originally claim complete ownership and provide no references or sources at all? Then yes, by any definition plagiarism and absolutely unquestionable wrong.
Good grief, (Score:2, Interesting)
nothing is really original anymore. When you have a planet with a population of nearly 7 billion -- it is fairly easy for me to claim that 99.999% of everything written, said, or done today, has been done by someone else in the past: including music.
Even mathematics is full of stories where there is more than one inventor, who claimed that they developed ideas independently.
If the offense is blatant copy-infringement, and contributes more than an insignificant impact to the copied works, then let a judge determine a financial penalty.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
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"
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
People usually add some music/lyrics of their own over sampled sounds, too. Does the book have layered text on top of each page? ;)
The book certainly is certainly telling a new story so yes, metaphorically every page is layered with original creative work on top of the 'sampled' text.
The most interesting sentence in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
Referring to the German Amazon page about the book, the Times article said 'Under the heading “Customers who bought this item also bought” was “Strobo” by Airen'. I think that raises some interesting questions. Artistic questions aside, can you argue that plagiarism damages the author of the plagiarized work if it increases sales?
There are two common theories for why we have copyright. I think the more correct one (at least for US copyright law -- yes, I realize that these events are playing out in Germany, under German law) is that copyright exists in order to promote creativity, and on that basis it's very hard to argue that "mashup" works that actually do create something new and interesting by combining pieces of older stuff don't satisfy that goal just as well as purely original works. And in this case, no one appears to be arguing that this young woman is simply riding the coattails of Airen.
The other theory is the economic one: that copyright exists so that authors get paid. Although we'd need to see real numbers to know for sure, the fact that sales of "Axolotl Roadkill" seems to be driving increased sales of "Strobo" seems to indicate that this usage of text from Strobo satisfies that version of copyright rationale as well. It'll be interesting to see what Airen says about the use of his work. Does he feel ripped off, or flattered?
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
And there were a few sampling lawsuits when it first got popular, because artists were taking the samples without paying royalties for them.
Since she thinks it's OK, perhaps we should "sample" her book to a txt file and distribute it for free online ;)
Re:No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, right. Like anyone who is well-versed with today's media culture would ever bother with that. Whatever...
[1] davecb (6256), www.slashdot.org, post #31120624, 12 February 2010.
Re:Music sampling is accompaniment (Score:3, Interesting)
"Further, you don't pretend you didn't sample, you give credit where it's due."
Unless you're Timbaland, then you act like a little bitch and claim it was sampling AFTER you get busted. Which almost puts him in the same league as Vanilla Ice, who I don't think ever admitted to stealing Bowie's riff.
But I agree, sampling done right (giving credit where credit is due) is fine. Anything less is plagiarism.
Re:The most interesting sentence in the article (Score:1, Interesting)
since copyright only covers the expressions of ideas,
Apparently not - see all the licensing of rights for remakes of foreign movies (and the occasional lawsuit when the rights have not been secured).
If a remake of a movie in a different language, with different actors, different cinematography and the inevitable differences in storyline is still considered the same expression then the definition of 'expression' has become so broad that it is nearly boundless.
Re:Definitely Not (Score:3, Interesting)
At the university I attended, making a mistake in the format of your references was considered plagiarism.
Yeah... that's because otherwise people would claim that they just 'made a mistake' and forgot to mention a couple cites. At my college, when there were cheating scandals, we always heard the perp say that, which is crazy because it doesn't make any sense. If you, say, mistakenly put a comma where the citation format requires a semicolon, I hardly think any school would bat an eye; but if you mistakenly cite 7 papers when you have whole paragraphs listed from 6 others, that's gonna get you parkhursted. Of course, there is a scale all along between those extremes.
it's not "plagiarism" (Score:2, Interesting)
Plagiarism is an academic concept, not an artistic one. Reuse of previous art in new art pieces has a very long history, in all forms of art: music, theater, painting, literature, dance, etc. There used to be nothing wrong with it, it didn't even need to be acknowledged.
Misapplying the concept of plagiarism to art probably has two sources: (1) academics who over-analyze art, and (2) greedy copyright holders who want to be able to make money off of even the slightest hint of reuse of their content.