Quote:
Originally Posted by David Marseilles
What she DID was wrong -- which was that she put her name on someone else's work and claimed it as her own. But if in fact, as netseeker suggests, she now has agreements to use what she used, it doesn't even matter what the law states about much you can use without permission, because she now has permission.
A major difference between this and your urinal example is that I very much doubt anyone mistook the craftsmanship of the urinal as a sculpter's work. They understood that what the artist was claiming was the re-purposing of something mundane as art. If he had claimed to have made it himself, or led people to believe he had, that would have been wrong too, wrong in that it would have been a lie. What he claimed was how to use it -- and if this author had cited her sources originally too, we'd probably be having a conversation about 'mixing' and literary value instead of a conversation about theft and lies.
Finally, I can't imagine how any of the comments here, or the topic "Plagiarism, Okay?" makes you think this is a topic about whether the book is good or not rather than whether plagiarism is ... wait for it, "okay". If you'd like to add your 2 cents about its potential literary value, feel free, but it almost sounded as if you were suggesting everyone but you was off-topic.
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To characterize what this author did as plagiarism is already to make a judgment about whether what she did was okay or not. The question is not whether plagiarism is okay - which it is clearly is not, it is whether this author plagiarized another author's work. I am raising a question about whether what she did is plagiarism, and my "2 cents worth about its potential literary value" is simply to suggest that we suspend judgment about the answer to that question since it is unanswerable without considering literary value.
Plagiarism is not simply passing someone else's work off off as ones own. If it was then we would have to count Michelangelo, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst - to name a few - as plagiarists since what they claim as their work was actually executed by a number of people other than themselves, yet the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Brillo boxes and the cut-in-half cows are considered to be "by" these artists. Furthermore, the artists fail to acknowledge the individuals who actually executed the works.
So far this young woman would seem to be in no different position from the artists mentioned. Her intellectual and aesthetic labour was concerned with conceptualizing the organization of some material in order to bring about some aesthetic affect or effect, (leaving aside for the moment the possibility that she did it primarily to make a stack of money). That she didn't actually create some of the strings of words that appear in the book, in her head, would seem to be as important to determining the value of the work as the fact that not all the brushstrokes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are by Michelangelo's own hand. And it is a question of the value of the work, since to say that it is plagiarized is to make a judgment as to the value of the work. Further, it is to make a judgment as to the value of the work on the basis of not having read but only having read an article in the NYT about it.
Now it may be that she did write the book primarily to make a stack of money, with no serious artistic intent. In which case I would agree that this is plagiarism. But are we really able to decide that on the basis of the information we have got?