A Prescriptivist Take on Plagiarism

[alixtii]

The "plagiarism = use without attribution" meme is going around again, and whenever it does, it really, really bugs me because by that standard Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both plagiarists--and any standard which results in that conclusion is for me a reductio ad absurdum. miriam_heddy has a good post discussing some of the issues here, but there are some things I want to say myself--mostly, I think, in parallel with her. She writes:

Plagiarism, like "technique" is judged not by intent but by effect, hence a writer's arguments that "I didn't mean to plagiarize" or "It was supposed to be a pastiche" aren't relevant when it comes to writing published or put out there to be read by someone other than the author. Or, as Stanley Fish points out with respect to irony not as a "fact" but as a "way of reading": The decision a reader makes will have been possible only in relation to decision procedures that have been authorized by the institution.

I'm not 100% sure whether she is writing in her own voice or merely summarizing a certain paradigm; her post is mostly descriptive, analyzing (quite well) the way "plagiarism" functions as a normative concept differently in academia and in fandom. But it doesn't really matter, because it's the paradigm cited above to which I'm going to respond in this moment as I make my extremely prescriptive argument as to what plagiarism is and is not. Under my view, the claim above isn't wrong so much as it is misleading, and (as miriam_heddy clearly recognizes) parallels issues of author intentionality in general. So I'd accept her use of Fish, but modify it with a use of Foucault (drawing on "What is an Author?").

It's not as simple as "what the author meant" or even "what the reader thinks," but a more complex hybrid: "what the reader thinks the author meant." The author's intentions are very much involved, but only insofar as constructed by the reader, as an author-function. Which was in my mind when I hazarded that perhaps ethics is about constructing a moral-agent function. I say in that post, parenthetically, regarding the then-recent "American President"/reel_sga wank (ETA: see here, courtesy of fairestcat), in which large portions of Sorkin dialogue were used in an SGA fusion:

The most damning facts about the accused parties in the recent cases is the way in which they are reported to have acted after producing the texts, the comments they made which interpretive conventions lead us to read as to having been made in their own voices and thus cause us to construct their intent in a certain way, as being having not made a good-faith effort. I say this without firsthand knowledge. A fact can be damning without being true.

In other words, the problem wasn't that they used other texts in their own without citation, but that when people complimented on those specific passages, they didn't say, "Thanks! Eliot really could write couldn't he?" but instead accepted the praise for themselves. That is the dividing line between allusion and plagiarism, I continue to insist.

I've already made it clear I've posted in this issue before; most recently was here, when I linked to this languagelog post with commentary, which gave the following distinction between plagiarism and allusion (I quoted it even more extensively in my previous post):

That's the subtle line between plagiarism and literary allusion. It's plagiarism if you copy someone's writing and you don't want it to be noticed that you were copying; it's allusion if you do exactly the same but you do want it to be noticed.

Note the reliance on (a readerly construct of?) authorial intent here; what matters is not whether something is noticed or not noticed but whether (we think) the alleged plagiarist wanted the plagiarism to be noticed. She could have misjudged her audience, and expected they would, say, recognize Buffy quotes in a Harry Potter fic, when it turns out they actually don't (what's wrong with them?). (I certainly don't recognize all of Pound's allusions in the Cantos, but that's why I have a trusty compendium--it's my fault for not living up to Pound's rather clear expectations, not his fault for having too high expectations.) I cited the Angel quotes in this XMM fic just to be safe, but I really feel like I shouldn't have had to do that--it was a virtual certainty that my flist would recognize the scene I was paying homage to. I could have been wrong (although judging by the response, I wouldn't have been), but it would still have been in good faith.

Of course, it's fairly easy to construct the intent of an author/moral agent who utilizes a passage from an obscure passage of which no one has ever heard; equally easy is it to construct that of one who uses an instantly recognizable line of Shakespeare. The problematic cases which lie in the grey area between are much harder to judge, but my inclination is always, in the name of increased artistic freedom, to give the author the benefit of the doubt.

miriam_heddy certainly seems to recognize all of this:

if a fanfic story includes dialogue from an episode and a reader doesn't recognize it and praises the writer for coming up with such a clever line, fandom ethics generally dictate that the fan writer write back and say, "Yeah--that was a great line, but it's canon" rather than sit back and accept the praise for a line s/he didn't write.

[. . .]

So what if a fan writer takes a whodunnit plot from a not-so-well-known text and uses it, with little or no modification, as the basis for her television fandom story without giving the plot author credit? If a fan reader says, "Great story!", should the writer (even if the reader make no reference to the plot) catch herself and say, "Thanks!" and then, in the interest of full disclosure, add a note saying, "I borrowed the plot from a novel by ____"? Is it the responsibility of the writer to pre-emptively give credit for all texts from which material was borrowed? Is it enough to just give a blanket "thanks" to that other author without specifying how much of a debt the fanwriter owes to that writer's published text?

Yet miriam_heddy remains in the descriptivist mode; in the end, she seems happy to simply try to more clearly articulate what the fannish mores are which pervail at this socio-historical location:

even though discussions of Cassie Claire's stories may have introduced "pastiche" into the vocabulary of fandom, it hasn't yet been picked up enough that fans regularly recognize and accept and sanction the incorporation of another (non-canon) writer's sentences and paragraphs (as  fans do recognize "remix" and "OTP" and "AU" as legitimate, fannish genres).

I'm not happy with that, because I'm afraid that if Eliot and Pound were in fandom, the fen would burn them in effigy right next to [insert accused plagiarist here], and I'm more than willing to take a normative stance on that as a very bad thing. If we're continuing the paralleling of ethics and literary criticism, my stance can be compared to feminist or post-colonial criticism: readings of a text given to multiple interpretations, but with a strong normative claim about the way we should be reading. There is something specifically deficient and detrimental about a definition of plagiarism as strictly equivalent to mere "use without attribution."

Note that I have no opinion on whether any specific individual is or is not a plagiarist by the standards I suggest (for one thing, I have no experience of their audiences, and thus what those audiences could reasonably be expected to know); I only want to ensure that all individuals are judged by the correct set of standards. The target of people's scorn may well deserve it; but when dishing it out, there's a very real danger in nonetheless painting with too wide a brush.

Comments

[lim.livejournal.com]

Well.. yeah, I might. I don't know why I would but I'm not going to say I wouldn't ever do it. Not his actual painting, but a copy...but then of course I don't think you mean an original because all these hypothetical schoolkids aren't cutting up original manuscripts and sticking them in their copybooks.

but, yes, I completely did, as I said, I read debates on metafandom for a couple of years and then I regurgitated them. I used, frex, a couple hundred stock photographs in a vid I made, all cut up to make letters to spell out words. I never credited all those people who took those photographs, and they never credited the person that painted the signs that were their subjects, or their original designer... My point is that nothing comes wholly outta anyone's ass and that it's ridiculous to pretend it does.

And omg! For real I am tired of being told what y'all did at school. I don't care what rules you all made up there. Fandom is not an extension of bloody university.

But anyway, this is the crux though, isn't it. The issue here seems to be this idea of stealing credit, not making the art itself. So my solution is simple. I will continue to do exactly what I want, and if it upsets you, don't credit me. Take my art and use it uncredited! That's a revenge I can get behind, heh. I think that works well for everyone.

[celisnebula.livejournal.com]

Ah but see, if someone were to take my photography (which I do sell) and try to edit it and claim it as theirs... well that is plagiarism, and you can bet your ass I will be calling my lawyer to contact them.

So go ahead and do what you’ve been doing. It may never have a causal affect on your life, and one day it might – you might take and regurgitate something that the original creator doesn’t want regurgitated elsewhere and end up in court.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

"Failure" to credit != claim of ownership. Which is the entire point of the post, obviously.

[lim.livejournal.com]

I feel like you're just stating a position, like... oh, it's the plagiarism debate on metafandom, better roll out my Point Of View! Judy! Get my Point of View down from the back bedroom! *grins*

But anyway! Yeah, I might end up in court one day. But ending up in court doesn't always mean you've done something wrong, or even illegal. That's precisely what the court is there to determine.

take my photography (which I do sell) and try to edit it and claim it as theirs...well that is plagiarism

Jeff Koons, an appropriation artist, recently did just that (http://www.clancco.com/art_law/koons_wins_appeal_and_right_to_use_copyrighted_mat_1.html), and won his case (http://blogs.fairusenetwork.org/?p=12). So yes, I certainly could be sued, but that's not the same thing as being wrong.

It's my duty to evaluate my acts and their consequences to the world I inhabit. In this case, somewhat egotistically, I have decided that it is less harmful to make art (or really, more to the point, to live in a world where such art is allowed to exist) than to refrain from making art for fear of litigation.