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?"
No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If you write a novel where you sample from many other books, quoting prominently would be distracting. I'd be ok with a list of sources in the back that points out which snippets came from where. In an electronic version of the book, the reader could configure how to display text fragments that were sampled.
I'm all for creative use of earlier works. Copyright law should not be an artificial obstacle that limits the texts an artist can write. Like in music, sampling significant pieces of text might require m
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
A mutt can be an excellent dog... (Score:4, Insightful)
A mutt can be an excellent dog even if it doesn't have any papers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Neither art nor music should have any position about plagiarism. Plagiarism is for academics whose need for acknowledgment overwhelms their desire to further their own and society's knowledge, and those who care more about their bank account than producing something of value. While it seemed distasteful to me at first, Bowie, Mercury, and Van Halen were all exposed to new audiences when they were sampled, and I truly believe they were better off for being sampled. Jazz, Blues, and Rock and Roll would not exist without constant borrowing and even stealing. The best music in the world was created when everyone was stealing from everyone else in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Would Hendrix have been as big if he hadn't covered a folk song, All Along the Watchtower? Would Zeppelin, the Stones, or Clapton have been so big without such obviously stolen blues songs and riffs? Did Dylan suffer from Jimi's cover? No, his fan base grew. Did all the Blues musicians suffer? No, in fact many were likely saved from obscurity, for at the time no 'decent' white folk would listen to such music. I think it axiomatic that the more selfish you are, the more yourself and the world suffers. The more generous you are, the more yourself and the world benefits.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was certainly speaking generally, in the interest of playing devil's advocate if nothing else. I certainly want scientists to get paid. As it is it seems they do an awful lot of work while corporations end up benefiting disproportionately. From my perspective, your system is not functioning very well if it's to support you materially. My point is that brilliance usually makes itself apparent, and pretenders are soon found out, especially in an environment were information flows freely.
The music business w
Re:A mutt can be an excellent dog... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, ultimately we still need to keep people who are great scientists doing science, rather than spending decades of their life trying to make a product just so they can enjoy a payday. I agree the system is broken, and I'm not sure how to fix it. However, freely publishing and giving correct attribution for work done seems to be a pretty straightforward benefit to both scientists and society in general.
Sadly, so much research gets done these days solely with products in mind that a lot of potentially valuable blue-sky research never happens.
Re:A mutt can be an excellent dog... (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, sadly you can't get that oh-so-valuable dribble without worthwhile lab time to test which bits are non-valuable dribble. A lot of the drool produced by scientists is actually quite worthless and flawed. The process is as follows:
Laboratories are highly-tuned apparatuses set up to extract the valuable drool milked from professors by their students. At weekly meetings, the students collect the drool on 'plots' and 'graphs' specially prepared for this purpose. In the lab, the students take the dribble and carefully distill the concentrated saliva to separate out the valuable fractions then bake them into what are called 'papers'.
These papers, once prepared, are taken back to the professor to be 'proofed', wherein the professor will produce further dribble, but of a much higher and refined grade than first obtained. This process is known as 'editing' and is a common technique used to refine otherwise coarse secretions across many industries. Once infused with the higher grade of slime, these papers are sent to a panel of judges to be assessed and certified. Only the very finest dribble is passed to be presented at fairs and meetings where these students show their prize professors and hawk the papers.
The very best papers may eventually be bought by investors who will take them and wring the saliva out of it and eventually incorporate it into any number of products. These include pharmacuticals, industrial lubricants, robots, batteries and computers. The uses of academic slime are truly limitless!
Over time, researchers exposed to the highest grade drool in the course of their work may begin to produce the dribbles themselves. When they are recognised as lucrative dribble producers, they will be put out to pasture themselves so that their valuable effusions may be harnessed. This is called 'tenure'.
And that's how science is done.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a very good point. Sampling would be taking a short section of text and putting using in quotes, or otherwise acknowledging in your work that you are using something that someone else wrote.
I don't think that there always has to to be a citation. I can think of a couple of situations in which it wouldn't be necessary, at least not morally (I won't touch legal issues).
There's no need to credit a "sample" is brief and of something sufficiently well-known to the intended audience. This is extremely common in poetry and has been since antiquity. For example, if I begin my poem about a romance between two pine borer beetles with the line "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood", I don't need to mention Robert Frost because everyone likely to read it sees what I'm doing. Obviously the line between obvious and not-obvious is a fuzzy one and depends on the audience, but it's a good general guideline.
I also think that a work that is very obviously built of "samples" needn't expressly say what is what. I'm thinking here of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March [wikipedia.org] by Frederic Tuten, which consists in part of passages lifted directly from a wide variety of sources (it's the first place I'd ever seen Nathaniel Hawthorne on the art of sculpture used to discuss Mao). I don't remember if Tuten credits his "samples" or not, so it might be a bad example, but in a work like that, which is clearly and expressly made up in large part of words not originally written by the author, part of the game is in trying to figure out who originally wrote what, and what part is pastiche or parody instead of quotation.
The key is that in neither of the above cases is the author trying to pass of someone else's work as his own. Hegemann pretty clearly was, and now is just making stuff up to try and get away with it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Basing your work on earlier works has been done since antiquity. Ovid certainly did, and yet his work was still original. There's a line here. It's one thing to be influenced, even, perhaps, to adopt passages, but if you're just lifting wholesale large bits of prose from other authors, sticking it in there as your own, then no, that's not "sampling", that's just stealing.
A lot of it depends on the audience. Ovid's audience would certainly known about, and likely read, earlier Roman and Greek mythologica
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you sample a female actress and you are a male singer, it's pretty obvious. (and vice versa)
Or if it is from a very recognizable song.
Past there it gets increasingly muddy.
Plagiarism is bad because it's been ruled to be bad in the past. Why is it bad per se if the result is informative or entertaining?
Re:No, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, as many others pointed and will point out, the plagiarist is taking credit on originality that belongs to somebody else.
It's not bad just because it's been ruled to be bad. It's bad because plagiarism allows anyone to do a quick search in "obscure" literature, pick up some particularly interesting piece and resell it as being his own original work. It's great for the plagiarist, may be good to the public, but not so for the original creator.
You can be informative and entertaining over other people's work, as long as you give them credit.
You don't need to claim authorship to be entertaining.
Re:No, no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Books and maps were originally allowed to be copyrighted for 16 years as this was viewed as necessary to help people recoup their costs of production, newspapers, handbills, plays, and music were not allowed copyright protection.
With on demand publishing the cost of publication is essentially covered by the purchaser, negating the original rational for copyright protection for books.
If the point of copyright protection is to increase the number of works available to the public, in both quantity of titles and the availability of those works, it would seem like the only form of work that requires substantial investment, in 2010, is movies. Most other things can be done with a capital expense of a $300US computer and an internet connection.
With two hundred years of tweaking copyright law there has become a perception of rights of creators. While this may be a worthwhile endeavor to purse such an objective, it has never been openly made, but rather stuck in the back door.
Claiming credit for something someone else did is slander under certain circumstances, and there is a lot to be said for truthful acknowledgement of creation, but a creative work is generally more than the sum of its parts, and the pro copyright supporters seem to be failing to acknowledge that copyright as it is currently implemented causes a great number of works to be unavailable to the general public, in direct opposition to the intent of granting copyright, and the pro copyright supports do not seem to be answering this rather important question. — How is copyright helping create more books in todays world where we have word processes on almost every desk, and multiple printing on demand services?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because quality control, editing, and advertising isn't free, on-demand publishing is vastly more expensive per-book and doesn't scale well, the author's time is a significant investment from the standpoint of the author, and, frankly, you're only paying attention to one of the many claimed benefits of copyright.
To deal with these in order:
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
People usually add some music/lyrics of their own over sampled sounds, too. Does the book have layered text on top of each page? ;)
Re: (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.
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.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the Verve did license that sample [in Bittersweet Symphony,] but lost in court anyway
Fortunately, nothing of value was lost.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, they did have a license - but there was litigation on the matter because they apparently sampled "too much" of the source track, and now the Rolling Stones get all the royalties from that track. So it's not a good example, as it's more a question of whether their use of the sample was so extensive as to not make it an original work at all.
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVuh1Ymve2I [youtube.com]
I had to look this up. The song is actually "The Last Time"
Re: (Score:2)
Just compare I Want A New Drug [youtube.com] and Ghostbusters [youtube.com] and then look into the legal processes around that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
in creative works I don't know if this really is as important.
Legally, if you specifically take text directly from one source, and transplant it to your work, you need to obtain permission or supply a bibliography no matter the "genre." If you're paraphrasing, then unless it's substantial (amount changes per jurisdiction), you don't need to do anything (though if non-fiction, citing sources is just best practices).
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed with OP + Not to the mention the fact that often (but not always) samples are used in a starting point and end up completely unrecognisable / different-sounding in the final product (NIN songs are a good example of this, they sample literally tons of things and are normally distorted to the point where they're not even anything like the original material)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed: in writing, one commonly samples other people's work using a moderately well-known process called "quoting". I'm mildly surprised she hasn't heard of it.
In quoting, one marks the material quoted with either in-line or block quotes, and lists the source, usually at the bottom of the page in something called a "footnote" (;-))
--dave
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed: in writing, one commonly samples other people's work using a moderately well-known process called "quoting". I'm mildly surprised she hasn't heard of it.
In quoting, one marks the material quoted with either in-line or block quotes, and lists the source, usually at the bottom of the page in something called a "footnote" (;-))
--dave
[citation needed]
Re: (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 #311206
Re: (Score:2)
Let is remember also that information is non-rivalrous, thank god no one can copyright all frequencies of sound, light, etc.
Everything in the end is just remixed bits of the natural world which no one created.
Re: (Score:2)
And even when you are sampling music it usually makes you realize that the original was better.
But when writing a book, sampling has occurred before, but then usually mostly in the form of short quotes from other sources. To pick large sections of a story is another issue, but it's nothing new.
And one striking section is when you read The Last Castle [amazon.com] by Jack Vance, and then Kirlian Quest [amazon.com] by Piers Anthony. They do share a section that is very similar in plot and performance. (I leave it up to the reader to f
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between bands like Girl Talk who sample music to create new pieces, and someone copying someone else's words into a paper they're writing, is that Girl Talk doesn't claim to have made the samples. One of the aspects of why plagiarism is seen as wrong is because you're taking credit for someone else's work. When you're sampling music, you're crediting them.
Agreed. Often, sampled sounds are clearly recognizable as they are intended to bring an association from the original material: take something everyone knows, twist it, shuffle with other sounds, and make something new. The artists are not trying to hide the origin of their samples, but paying homage to them. Indeed, there is a long-standing history of one artist performing works by another, adding their own touch to the music. Furthermore, when that happens and the second artist makes money at it (sometimes even when they don't), they have to pay royalties to the first artist.
Unattributed lifting without manipulation is not the same. Didn't we just have an article earlier today about cheating in CS classes at Stanford? It's not just illegal, it's unethical.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Sampling could also mean that you distort the sample enough to give it you own twist.
I didn't rtfa either, but you shan't just claim you said what someone else actually said. On the other hand. I might splurge around the words "we were put on this earth to fart around and don't let anyone tell you any different" (without the quotes, and in fact I don't know if that's a direct quote) and, expecting the in-the-know to get the reference. I foresee these discussions being messier in the near future.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Please tell me I'm not the only one seeing a blank post concerning the parent.
Re:No. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes (Score:2)
obviously she's a child who has never worked before. scary part is she believes her entire generation thinks this is acceptable. No doubt she believes pirating is fine. Wonder if she'd mind if we all stole her book?
She must not have taken high school classes yet... (Score:2)
In my years at high school in the late 90s, they showed all of the forms of documentation standards to properly credit research. With services like TurnItIn.com all the rage in academia the risk of being labeled a cheater for using a sentence that has already been written by somebody else has gone way up. This is a case where the "child prodigy" is just somebody who hasn't learned the rules of the world yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Correction: With businesses like TurnItIn.com all the rage in academia the risk of being labelled a cheater at all approaches 100%.
Turnitin and its ilk are businesses first and foremost. As long as plagiarism rates remain high business is good, and since they control the reported amount of plagiarism and there is no possible defense against an accusation by their system there will always be a high rate of plagiarism.
In a way it is understandable (Score:2)
It seems that today we are exposed to a lot more sources of information and ideas and the amount of raw "data" per source is both smaller than it used to be (blogs, twitter, irc, podcasts, etc.) while at the same time larger ("Hey, this snippet of text from $AUTHOR was pretty good, I wonder what I can find about him on Google/Wikipedia...").
If you were writing a book back in say, 1950, you would have to base it a lot more on your own experiences in the "physical"/"real" world while today you would probably
Whee (Score:5, Funny)
Hello, kdawson.
No.
Who cares?
Yes.
No.
I might read the article next time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This makes me wish I had mod points.
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Sure... certain parts (generally small parts) can be sampled or "borrowed", and still be legitimate. But when you take people like Kid Rock for example, and listen to him outright take someone else's music -- with hardly a single change -- and then add lyrics of his own, that is not Fair Use, that is plagiarism. It is nothing but capit
Re: (Score:2)
But when you take people like Kid Rock for example, and listen to him outright take someone else's music -- with hardly a single change -- and then add lyrics of his own, that is not Fair Use, that is plagiarism
Weird Al does it better.
Re: (Score:2)
How bout Weird Al?
Avoiding subconscious plagiarism? (Score:2)
Re:Whee (Score:4, Funny)
Hello, kdawson.
Note to self: stop reading Slashdot when kdawson is editing because the signal-to-silliness goes to hell.
Definitely Not (Score:2)
Not that plagiarism or copyright infringement is stealing... I know the difference and why the law treats them differently. But that was the closest thing that came to mind just now.
This "new generation" needs to wise the f* up and learn the difference between Fair Use and just plain plagiarizing someone else's work. If they don't, everybody else will end
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
But it's not just listing the reference, but also the amount of the work that is "borrowed" that determines infringement. Using whole pages, even with references, might qualify as infringement all by itself. Much depends on the circumstances... but much does not.
Re: (Score:2)
No, plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. They're related, but orthogonal. You can quote any amount of text and not be plagiarizing as long as it's quoted and attributed. Using whole pages might be copyright infringement, and there might be so little of your own work that it's not really a unique paper any more, but you're ok on plagiarism as long as you don't claim it's your own.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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
Childish (Score:5, Interesting)
It's sad that some people think this is okay (Score:2)
Her generation grew up sampling from other sources -- and I've always felt that was a result of a weak and uncreative person. I wonder where is the line when sampling becomes copying. In any event, I hope that the people being stolen from are being compensated ( but I doubt it ).
Re: (Score:2)
Have you read Free Culture [wikipedia.org]? It might change your perspective on how "owned" our cultural treasures should be.
Also this kind of sampling is rather common in literature. I'm not sure how extensive her plagiarism was, but a large proportion of The Waste Land [wikipedia.org] for example is pieced together from other writings..
Re: (Score:2)
Would you also say that if you are building a house, you should construct all the bricks yourself - otherwise you're a poor and unskilled builder?
If you are a writer, should you invent all the words yourself, otherwise you're a weak writer?
There are entire genres of music that have sprung up based upon sampling the drum beat out of ONE SONG from 40 years ago (c.f. Amen Break).
Isaac Newton is said to have made a comment about how he only achieved what he achieved by standing on the shoulders of giants.
I Just Can't Agree With This (Score:2)
I also feel like writers should be rewarded with incentives for their work. If her anything goes usage attitude was applied to me I w
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree entirely that she should have sought permission from the authors whose work she was cribbing. The article indicates she lifted an entire page from someone's else's work with only minor changes. The authors whose works were use without permission ought to sue, and if Hegeman
Re:I Just Can't Agree With This (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I guess I am not from her Generation but sampling started when I was in my early 20s. If done correctly in music it is like a collage and it is a new piece of art.
When done wrong it is theft.
I am thinking of Ice Ice Baby as a good example of done wrong.
In this books case I would say it is theft from the story "In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes."
Dude that isn't sampling that is a cover!
Or to put another way. Every generation at 17 thinks that the world is a totally different place from the one their parents lived in. By the time we hit 35 we all start to think man it probably really wasn't. And at 40 we all start saying What the hell where we thinking when we where 17. What idiots we where but it sure was fun.
So no she is just another dumb 17 year old that thinks the rules don't apply anymore because things are so different.
Depends (Score:2)
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We're to the point where nearly all four-note combinations are under copyright, and therefore it's hard to write an "original" song without having to pay somebody else for the rights.
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But if you were to copy something of much more length, such as a complete rhythm or background, you might be infringing.
For example
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even if 100 artists agree with you, I have no doubt whatever that I could find, with little effort, 1,000 who do not.
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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
If she said that upfront - before all this blew up... then perhaps she might have a legitimate point. But after the fact is smacks of ignorance, laziness and a protozoan intellect pretending to be great.
Re: (Score:2)
Plagiarism and copyright violation (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who is only slightly older than she is. Yes, this is plagiarism. I'm TAing now and if a student handed in something like this we'd fail her. No question. They might even go in front of a disciplinary committee and certainly would if this were not the first time.
This is also a gross abuse of copyright. I'm not talking about the evil "oh this has been copyrighted for 70s years" copyright, or even using copyright for non-commercial uses. This is classic copyright violation for her own commercial use. That's precisely what sensible copyrights prevent you from copying. And it isn't like these are short enough passages that there's even any real remixing but rather long sections and the like.
The fact that she didn't acknowledge the sources makes the whole thing all the more egregious and shows that she really probably knew what she was doing was wrong. If not, she was so ignorant that it didn't occur to her that this might be a problem. Either way, it is deeply unimpressive.
Re:Plagiarism and copyright violation (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, this is plagiarism. I'm TAing now and if a student handed in something like this we'd fail her. No question.
Irrelevant. Student honor codes quite rightly require originality (though it's less common that we'd wish), but the world isn't school.
This is also a gross abuse of copyright. I'm not talking about the evil "oh this has been copyrighted for 70s years" copyright, or even using copyright for non-commercial uses. This is classic copyright violation for her own commercial use.
That would be the case if the new work was merely exploiting the old, lacking the creativity to make something worthwhile. But that doesn't appear to be the case here. Instead, it appears that the new work is substantially better and more valuable than the old, and also that a key part of the innovative ideas in the new work is related exactly to the mixing of old materials, without permission or apology, to create new value.
Further, from a purely economic standpoint, it appears that the success of "Axolotl Roadkill" may actually be driving sales of "Strobo". I think you'd better wait to see if the original author -- the only person who has legal standing to sue for infringement -- actually feels damaged. It may well be that his ego is flattered and his wallet is fattened and that he has no objections whatsoever.
The fact that she didn't acknowledge the sources makes the whole thing all the more egregious and shows that she really probably knew what she was doing was wrong.
Perhaps. Or perhaps she was just making her book an example of the mashup culture she was writing about, and recognized that calling attention to it would remove her work from that culture -- because that's not the norm there.
Re:Plagiarism and copyright violation (Score:4, Insightful)
First, in regard to your last sentence, you can't do something illegal and then say "it's art" and expect to get away with it. That is a specious argument. Second, that argument -- valid or not -- might have drawn some sympathy if she had simply said up front that she was deliberately doing a mashup. But she didn't. Rather than saying "Here, this is part of what my art is all about", she used it as an excuse after she was caught.
Mashup (or "mixing") or not, there is a limit to how much you can "borrow" from the art or talent of another, without doing something that is morally and ethically wrong. Simple common sense should tell you that. Otherwise you have some kind of problem recognizing what is ethical.
"Further, from a purely economic standpoint, it appears that the success of "Axolotl Roadkill" may actually be driving sales of "Strobo". I think you'd better wait to see if the original author -- the only person who has legal standing to sue for infringement -- actually feels damaged. It may well be that his ego is flattered and his wallet is fattened and that he has no objections whatsoever."
I don't think so. If she didn't have permission in advance, she still did something wrong, even if the original authors (plural... apparently there were more than one plagiarized) later decide that it is okay.
"Perhaps. Or perhaps she was just making her book an example of the mashup culture she was writing about, and recognized that calling attention to it would remove her work from that culture -- because that's not the norm there."
See... people keep referring to this "mashup culture" as though that were some kind of valid excuse for infringement or plagiarism. It is not. I realize that these are not the same things, but it also wouldn't be a valid excuse for theft or assault. You can't just sit there and say "my generation grew up doing shitty things to people, so it's okay", unless you want the rest of society to laugh at you... and maybe put you in jail.
wait, what's the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
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 [nytimes.com], 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?
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
Some thoughts on this (Score:5, Funny)
Have we entered a new era where plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
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Have we entered a new era where plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
It was a dark and stormy night.
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Have we entered a new era where plagiarism is not just tolerated, but seen as normal?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
It was a dark and stormy night.
Burma Shave
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I'm gonna kill that bitch!
From the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Entire pages verbatim? She is the Vanilla Ice of literature sampling then.
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AFAIK, she didn't copy whole pages verbatim. In the box at the bottom of
this page [faz.net], you can find a comparison of the original and her text (in German, of course).
Generating sales for the plagiarized book (Score:2)
As stated in the article, the whole controversy is also generating sales for the lesser-known "Strobo" book that was allegedly plagiarized. That can't be a bad thing.
http://www.amazon.de/Axolotl-Roadkill-Helene-Hegemann/dp/3550087926/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266012743&sr=8-1 [amazon.de]
Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.
Re:Generating sales for the plagiarized book (Score:4, Insightful)
Still waiting for copyright enforcement advocates to realize that copyright infringement isn't always a bad thing.
Nothing that is against the law or otherwise a violation of a property right is always a "bad thing".
No form of stealing is always bad. Trespassing isn't always bad. Neither is copyright infringement. Neither is outright theft. But in each instance, you impinge on someone's inherent and exclusive rights (otherwise known at law as "property"), and the adult thing to do is to face the consequences of that action and pay the price.
Take trespassing, for example. Unless you're stomping on some prized and rare flowers, it causes no harm to anyone and permanently deprives the owner of the land of nothing. And yet, it remains unlawful because the owner of the land has the sole right to authorize admission onto it, whether it would be reasonable to deny entry or not, or whether he charges for admission at a reasonable rate or not. If you trespass, you are liable for damages should the owner wish to pursue them.
Now maybe you were injured and had a reasonable justification to trespass in order to get timely medical assistance. That's something that can be considered in the weighing of damages, but it doesn't change the fact that what you did was unlawful. It doesn't have to be reasonable, and the trespass might have been economically efficient or otherwise better than the alternative.
Taking food without paying when you're about to starve isn't a bad thing. But then turning and claiming you did nothing wrong is. You did what you had to do, and that will be considered in sentencing. You'll pay for the food that you took (restoring the tangible), and you will pay for the injury you caused to the food's owner by taking it without permission.
With copyright infringement, you pay for the injury, your depriving the owner of his exclusive property rights. That can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars (less than damages for trespassing) to many thousands, depending on the seriousness of your violation and the value of the work. Yes, there should be a cap on damages for private citizens infringing without commercial gain, but no, there should be no exception for arguing that your breach of law was a net positive. It often is with property crimes and impingement.
The law protects the rights of owners to maintain the freedom to make determinations on the use of their property. When an owner decides to sell some of those property rights, he has the right to determine at what price and under what conditions to do so, constrained only by other laws limiting his choice.
People are never required to do what's best with what they own. They're free to be as stupid, generous, savvy, greedy, or unreasonable as they wish, within the confines of the law.
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That's like saying that if a thug violently raped a woman, and impregnated her, and then their offspring grew up to be a great author, that it sorta makes rape ok.
Anyway, what I find surprising about this story is that Axolotl Roadkill's publisher's have continued to print/distribute the book after knowing that it violates copyright.
Stop "sampling" my work! (Score:3, Funny)
Hey you! Stop "sampling" my work. I own the rights to ALL those words, and all the remixes, you thieves!
signed: Daniel Webster
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It's a matter of degree (Score:2)
Art has always built on ideas and elements from the work of previous artists. Mozart's first four piano concertos are arrangements of piano solo movements written by other composers. Liszt arranged Beethoven's symphonies for piano solo and two pianos. Most of Shakespeare's plots and characters are not original. Rachmaninov wrote a famous "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini". Beethoven's "Wellington" Symphony incorporates "God save the King". The cover art to Terry Pratchett's book "Night Watch" adapts Re
Works Cited (Score:2)
Limitations of the medium (Score:2)
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:The most interesting sentence in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
She didn't fess up until she got busted, didn't she? And that's the only reason why the other book is being bought, ain't it?
Was she saying she planned to get busted all along? The lying twit.
Re:The most interesting sentence in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact is that plagiarism does not exist. Only in the academic world does the concept exist. In the real world, plagiarism itself is perfectly legal, and at worst is a moral/ethical failing.
Copyright infringement is what matters in the real world, and is orthogonal to plagarism. For example, it is not actually plagiarism to publish somebody else's work in its entiretly as the majority of a new work, as long as the original atuhor is credited. (One may still be failed in a class for doing so, as the assignment would quite likely fail the requirements, but that is a separate issue). But it very well may be copyright infringement to do so. On the other extreme, it is plagiarism to use somebody else's arguments, even if you completely rewrote them. However that would not be copyright infringement, since copyright only covers the expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
Perhaps definitions would help show this: Plagiarism is "using somebody else's ideas without acknowledging the source.
Copyright infringement is "using somebody else's expression of an idea without permission and in excess of the fair use or equivalent exceptions".
Now this book in questions sounds like it has plagiarism if the source of borrowed ideas was not mentioned on an acknowledgments page or similar location. It might also be copyright infringement, regardless of any crediting, since specific expressions of ideas were re-used without permission. Only the latter is actually a problem. Crediting the idea sources would be nice, but the law does not require it.
Happens in Research Too (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Music sampling is accompaniment (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you sample in music, the sampling is just accompaniment, backing tracks. In other words, the DJ samples, the MC does not.
Further, you don't pretend you didn't sample, you give credit where it's due. You often pay the original artist, especially if the sampling is very prominent.
This young lady is not only guilty of plagiarism, but also of misunderstanding sampling. It's not plagiarism.
The literary version of sampling would be to write a new, unplagiarized book using existing characters and settings from another book. Like a Star Wars themed novel. In that case you use Star Wars as backing for a new work.
The tragedy of this is the manuscript should have been considered a first draft and rewritten in one voice, even by a ghostwriter. Publishing the same exact phrases is not required in order to be unoriginal.
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"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.
What Should Happen . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope she makes lots of money . . . and every last dime of it goes to the people she stole from.
What a jerk.
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"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -Pablo Picasso [quotedb.com]
"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -Igor Stravinsky [brainyquote.com]
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Steve Jobs [wikiquote.org]
"Good coders code, great coders reuse." -anonymous [google.com]