Plagerism

[pegkerr]

Here's an interesting article on the topic, which you may have seen already all over your friends page.

Comments

[vass]

*jawdrop*
I was getting sympathetic, and interested in the play, until I came to the bit "I thought it was news."

I don't think I *would* be less gobsmacked, actually, if I wasn't reading this on a break from a gruelling essay, with full academic citing.

It's like this woman didn't know whether to commit copyright infringement or libel. ...My mother's a character in a book. An author wrote a ficitonalised account of something that really happened somewhere she used to work. The author filed off the serial numbers, except in the cases where she couldn't, and then she still changed the names, but bloody well stuck to the facts. My mother's one (several, actually) of the filed-off characters. She was consulted. She was happy with it.

I know exactly how my mother would have reacted if she'd been both identifiable and misrepresented. She'd have sued the author's pants off.

And yet, I... *hand-wave* I defend the right of people to, for instance, write RPS. I just would be much happier if this particular author had been WAY more clear that she was doing something ethically dicey and potentially hurtful, and if she'd made it clear somewhere in the script that her play drew on real sources for inspiration but was not a real account. And I wish she'd filed the serial numbers off her main character better. On the other hand: mistakes and forgiveness. Wow. She sure picked the right play to commit plagiarism in.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Interesting article. Thanks for the link.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Interesting, but I do have some disagreements with the conclusions the author seems to draw. For one thing, if "Frozen" hadn't been brilliant, but rather a really bad play, I wonder how her attitude would have differed. Secondly, it would have been so very easy for the author of the play to note that she drew important concepts from Work A or Work B, and the fact that she thought the information was up for grabs without even bothering to check makes me irritable. On the other hand, I do agree that busting a person on grounds of plagerism on the grounds of one short sentence seems a trifle harsh. I'm not sure how to define a middle ground for this sort of thing, though. Perhaps it'll continue to evolve.