Gacked from Olympia
May. 27th, 2003 03:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heidiJudge Posner (who is also a prof at U Chicago's law school) has a new article about plagiairsm and copyright infringement issues which says many of the same things I've been saying over the past two-plus years (including, of course, the obligatory Romeo&Juliet/West Side Story reference).
To quote from the article:
This article really encapsulates my feelings on plagiarism issues - regardless of the amount of sympathy I feel for my friends when their ideas, their characters, their plots are used by other fanfic writers - if it's credited it isn't plagiarism. It might be copyright infringement, if the sections are identical *and* more than brief, or even if the characterisations are taken from one story to the other (although then the fair use argument does get to at least be made, even if it's on the line). It isn't plagiarism.
FA has tried to use consistent definitions, standards and rules on these issues since we started (although we do have a full stop on Anne Rice incorporation, in a CYA manner...) and I think in a way, it's been important for, as Judge Posner says, dissemination of ideas in the fandom.
"It would be better if the term "plagiarism" were confined to literal copying, and moreover literal copying that is not merely unacknowledged but deceptive."
And that's a good rule to apply when you're reading the HP books, unless you want to get hysterical about JKR's use of cockroach clusters, which is directly from a Monty Python sketch, or if you want to rant about the unoriginality of Shakespeare In Love. And so above, as below - the rule makes sense if you apply it to fandom works as well. Literal copying of a character, or a scene, where it's unacknowledged, gets the term. If you acknowledge it, it's not fraud - it may be bad writing, or it may be social-media-personal commentary, or it might be done to make a point about characters or types or styles or genres or all of the above.
To quote from the article:
Wholesale copying of copyrighted material is an infringement of a property right, and legal remedies are available to the copyright holder. But the copying of brief passages, even from copyrighted materials, is permissible under the doctrine of "fair use," while wholesale copying from material that is in the public domain - material that never was copyrighted, or on which the copyright has expired - presents no copyright issue at all.
Plagiarism of work in the public domain is more common than otherwise. Consider a few examples: "West Side Story" is a thinly veiled copy (with music added) of "Romeo and Juliet," which in turn plagiarized Arthur Brooke's "The Tragicall Historye of Romeo and Juliet," published in 1562, which in turn copied from several earlier Romeo and Juliets, all of which were copies of Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe.
"Paradise Lost" plagiarizes the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Classical musicians plagiarize folk melodies (think only of Dvorak, Bartok, and Copland) and often "quote" (as musicians say) from earlier classical works. Edouard Manet's most famous painting, "Dejeuner sur l'herbe," copies earlier paintings by Raphael, Titian, and Courbet, and "My Fair Lady" plagiarized Shaw's play "Pygmalion," while Woody Allen's movie "Play It Again, Sam" "quotes" a famous scene from "Casablanca." Countless movies are based on books, such as "The Thirty-Nine Steps" on John Buchan's novel of that name or "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on Hemingway's novel.
Many of these "plagiarisms" were authorized, and perhaps none was deceptive; they are what Christopher Ricks in his excellent book "Allusions to the Poets" helpfully terms "allusion" rather than "plagiarism." But what they show is that copying with variations is an important form of creativity, and this should make us prudent and measured in our condemnations of plagiarism.
Especially when the term is extended from literal copying to the copying of ideas.
This article really encapsulates my feelings on plagiarism issues - regardless of the amount of sympathy I feel for my friends when their ideas, their characters, their plots are used by other fanfic writers - if it's credited it isn't plagiarism. It might be copyright infringement, if the sections are identical *and* more than brief, or even if the characterisations are taken from one story to the other (although then the fair use argument does get to at least be made, even if it's on the line). It isn't plagiarism.
FA has tried to use consistent definitions, standards and rules on these issues since we started (although we do have a full stop on Anne Rice incorporation, in a CYA manner...) and I think in a way, it's been important for, as Judge Posner says, dissemination of ideas in the fandom.
"It would be better if the term "plagiarism" were confined to literal copying, and moreover literal copying that is not merely unacknowledged but deceptive."
And that's a good rule to apply when you're reading the HP books, unless you want to get hysterical about JKR's use of cockroach clusters, which is directly from a Monty Python sketch, or if you want to rant about the unoriginality of Shakespeare In Love. And so above, as below - the rule makes sense if you apply it to fandom works as well. Literal copying of a character, or a scene, where it's unacknowledged, gets the term. If you acknowledge it, it's not fraud - it may be bad writing, or it may be social-media-personal commentary, or it might be done to make a point about characters or types or styles or genres or all of the above.
