Jag tänker på plagiat verkshöjd

Postat: 2006-05-03 kl. 22.33

Malcolm Gladwell skriver om plagiat på sin blogg i samband med en skandal där Kaavya Viswanathan sägs ha plagierat stycken från Megan McCafferty:s tonårsromaner:

This is teen-literature. It's genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930's Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable—even laudable. I buy lots of spy novels, not because they diverge from the spy novel model, but because they conform to it. I want my spy to have a troubled home life, and an inpenetrable gaze and to be handy with a revolver. But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial—namely phrases and sentences? Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence.

gladwell dot com Viswanathan-gate (2006-04-30)

Han återvänder till tankar från en artikel i The New Yorker från 2004:

Old words in the service of a new idea aren't the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.

And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from "The Silence of the Lambs." Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit).

gladwell dot com something borrowed (2004-11-25)

Vad är det unika? Vad är verkshöjd?

Utan att sätta mig in alltför mycket i sakfrågan, jag är inte säker på att det är så intressant, läser jag ett inlägg som tar Kaavya i försvar:

Let's dispose of copyright infringement first. Even if Ms. Viswanathan had copied 24 passages literally from Ms. McCafferty's work she would not be guilty of copyright infringement because those 24 passages constitute a tiny fraction, less than 1%, of both novels and there is no sense in which they are of any particular importance. That falls well within the amount of copying permitted by the Fair Use doctrine. I doubt very much that any court would decide in favor of Ms. McCafferty on this point.

Language Log In defense of Kaavya Viswanathan (2006-04-25)

Kaavya Viswanathan:s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life kommer inte tryckas i en ny upplaga som var planerat och de kvarvarande exemplaren ska dras in.