Desicritics on Plagiarism

First there was the two-book, half-a-million dollar deal handed on a silver platter to a 17 year-old by the publishing powerhouse, Little, Brown. That the 17 year-old, Kaavya Viswanathan, was pretty, articulate, "nubile", as one of the Desicritics described her, smart and on her way to Harvard was icing on the cake.

Then came the book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life which was released with much fanfare, with fawning interviews published in newspapers across India and the US (and perhaps other countries as well).

Then trickled in allegations that something was rotten in the land of packaged, assembly-line produced, focus group-whetted chick-lit. The faithful among the legions of chick-lit fans smelt a rat - parts of Viswanathan's book read suspiciously like parts of another packaged, assembly... (you get the idea) chick-lit novel. So they promptly called in their indignation to newspapers and publishing houses and the wheels of justice slowly but surely inched their way to demolishing the carefully constructed house of modern, less than 15-minute fame, ending in Little, Brown pulling the maligned book off the shelves.

Around the same time, across the Pond, another publishing giant Random House, which published Dan Brown's insanely, obscenely successful book The Da Vinci Code was locked in a legal battle over the central theme of his book with the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.

There are many angles to these stories and Desicritics covered a fair number of them.

First came the news of the plagiarism in Kaavya Viswanathan Acknowledges Using Portions of Another Author's Book. The events were still unfolding and the future did not look so bleak for Viswanathan.

Her publisher was mouthing encouraging words, assuring everyone who would listen that the book would be revised to banish the offending passages to oblivion, she was mouthing fervent apologies through statements and on national television in the US. This state of affairs did not last long, though.

Matters swiftly degenerated to more allegations of plagiarism and there was no more talk of revising the book, the book would be pulled completely, or as Grumpy Old Indian Man so eloquently put it, pulped, in How Opal Mehta got Dissed, got Busted, But Still got Paid.

During exactly those same days, there was another plagiarism allegation making its rounds involving William Swanson, the CEO Raytheon. It turns out that the booklet, Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management unfortunately was not all Swanson's. Parts of it, Swanson admitted, was borrowed from a text written 60 years ago without crediting that author. But how many of you have heard of Swanson? Tapan drives home that point in Plagiarism - Kaavya Viswanathan Vs. William Swanson.

In the world of writing and writers, the fear of being accused of plagiarism is a monster that quietly lurks in the background says Richard Marcus in Writer's Notebook - Originality Above All.

It's not that I've sat down and either copied out someone else's words, or even taken their ideas and retooled them, but the fact remains that other people have written stories set during the same time period and locale as me.

But Richard distinguishes the above situation from the explanation that Viswanathan offered for her misstep ("I was so surprised and horrified when I found these similarities.") and wonders,

...how possible is it that another author's work will turn up verbatim in one's own book unintentionally? Especially when the books are about circumstances that bear a striking thematic resemblance. It's one thing to write a book that covers the same territory as another, but an author is expected to write their own version, offer a new perspective on familiar circumstances.

Moushumi Chakrabarthy picks up a similar thread in her essay Writers: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,

Long ago, some pundit said that there are no real 'new' themes left to explore in the human condition. It's all been done before, somewhere, by someone. So then, what do we write about? Also, if we have written, how do we know that our words are not the regurgitation of someone else's words, however obscure?

In the course of defending her work, Viswanathan used many words and concepts that were viewed rather skeptically by commentators and the media, concepts such as how she has a "photographic memory" and how she "unconsciously internalized" portions of the novels whose text ended up in her novel.

Hilal Isler, our own Desicritic, finds, to her horror, that she too has plagiarized portions of her profile from an as yet unnamed blogger in her cyber circle and issues her own heartfelt apology in Open Letter of Apology,

I am shocked and generally horrified at the thought that maybe, just maybe, I have sub/unconsciously INTERNALIZED your interests as my own and, ok, yes, PLAGIARIZED elements of your personal profile. Please accept my humble apologies. Know that I am a tremendous fan of (undisclosed site) and read (blog) religiously.... As a sidebar and in my defense, I should mention that I suffer under the stress of being painfully brilliant. I have a photographic memory that some neurologists have called "a masterpiece" and others have given "two thumbs way up."

Now we hop across the Pond to London, scene of the legal battle waged against Da Vinci Code. Dr. Politics delves into the case and analyzes exactly what an artist has a copyright in - whether in an idea or whether in the manner in which that idea is expressed in Copyright Law is Based Partly on Artistic Idealism. He quotes Ian Caplin,

"There is no copyright in an idea. Ideas are free to all and too disembodied to be protected by the law. Copyright law is based partly on artistic idealism (ideas are free and the law should leave them alone) and probably partly on the basis that taking another's disembodied idea is just too hard to prove. Every artist and creator has been inspired by the work of others. Taking an idea alone cannot and should not be policed."

Making our way across the continent to our own shores here in India, where plagiarism (particularly in Bollywood) is not unknown, we come to the case of Neha Bhasin who managed to buck the trend and pull the law on to her side and get her due for her work. Sakshi Juneja recounts her tale in Neha Bhasin Gets Her Deserved Credit,

Neha claims that she wasn't given due credit for the current chart-buster, 'Ek look, ek look'. Instead, the credit was taken by the producer of the film, Poonam Khubani. Not only a stay order, but the Delhi High Court judgment has restrained the producers of Aryan from promoting the film, and its music, without displaying her name as a lead female singer.

If you haven't already read these posts before, read them and comment away. If you have an opinion on this issue that is not already covered, we welcome you to write for Descritics.