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Originally Posted by DNSB
In some of the books, the plagiarist was quoting chunks of text verbatim plus stealing the plotline and characters with the names changed to protect the guilty. Another was basically changing the names of the characters and running the text through a thesaurus which led to some interesting word choices.
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To be fair to Amazon, much of what you're talking about isn't, in fact, plagiarism; it's copyright infringement. Similar, but not the same thing. There have been authors that take another's book and rewrite it, in their "own words" forever. There's nothing new there. I mean...for example we've all read Austen in modern times, like the movie
Clueless ("Emma"). Or again, with movies,
Barb Wire is a remake of
Casablanca. Sure, it's a sendup, but it's the same damned movie, when push comes to shove.
White House Down is
Under Siege, down to the helicopters-crashing scene. The list goes on and on and on. And how many times have we seen remakes of Death Wish? (over and over and over). Give me a few days and I can probably come up with a long list of books that do the same thing.
It
can be proven, but it requires your wife to go after the perpetrator. Amazon won't do it; it's copyright infringement and if it's a rewrite, rather than outright lifting of the exact text, that's a civil suit. Amazon
tries to work on it, but...
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The other item that was more my dislike than hers was the amount of jumping on the bandwagon though most of that was not plagiarism per se. Someone is getting popular writing about whatever so other authors jumped on the bandwagon in hopes of sharing that popularity. What I disliked most was the ones that were labelled as science fiction when the level of science would not have made the grade in a 1920's pulp magazine.
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Well, hell, that's NOT plagiarism, as you said. Theft of
concepts? You can't even copyright a concept, or trademark it. There's no law that would preclude you from writing a book about a boy wizard. Nothing that stopped The Dresden Files, for example, back when Urban Supernatural Fiction was pretty sparse. Nothing that stops writers from having huge critters that look like, yup, sandworms. And writers themselves decide what their book is; I remember the late great Anne McCaffrey in a major dustup with an interviewer who insisted that the Dragonriders of Pern series was fantasy and NOT sci-fi. From Anne's perspective, a world colonized by Earthlings/humans, with genetically-engineered Dragons? What's not sci-fi about that?
Speaking of Anne, how many dragonriders are there, in fiction today? Pshaw. I remember seeing something...oh, that kids' book, Eragon and thinking "Anne must be having a cow." That work took...concepts...from many different books and movies, from Star Wars to DoP and on and on. Sometimes, it's the mashup that works. I'm pretty sure we've
all seen some barely-known movie about horrible monsters that eat you alive, in an enclosed space (Alien). In some ways, how is that
NOT a remake of "The Thing from Another World"?
I do admit the whole sparkly vampire thing is just repulsive, but hey, I guess I'm too old to go gaga for boy-band vamps.
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Originally Posted by kyrilson
$20 for an ebook? Yikes. That’s highway robbery!! I’m all for supporting authors as I mentioned earlier, but that’s a bit much.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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It damn sure is. I mean, as I said, with print, at least you can get some residual value from it by reselling it or trading it in a used bookstore, if those still exist.
Hitch