Is it plagiarism if you want to use an idea or image that appears in another writer’s work and you ask for their permission to ‘borrow’ it? If there is no acknowledgement on the new work to say you borrowed it and that you had permission so to do – then others, not knowing about the permission, are open to seeing it as simple theft? I know a writer who makes a stand against plagiarism and so you’d think she would not approve of this borrowing; but she has done just this and acknowledges the same quite openly on her blog. Surely this is using someone else’s idea? And as such this writer should be against it?
If this is not plagiarism, then someone who does the same without permission is doing exactly the same act, but simply has not followed the good manners of asking first. Does that mean that plagiarism of this kind is just a want of manners? And if it is, then should we be that bothered about such borrowings?
My own view is that it is silly to get worked up over this type of borrowing and that writers do this all the time and sometimes do it consciously and unconsciously. But if this sort of theft is alright, then there needs to be some thought about where the line of unacceptability can be drawn. Is this an arbitrarily drawn line and if it is, then who decides where it should go? Surely the copyright law was put in place both to acknowledge the impossibility of drawing such a line and to at least impose some sort of safeguard of a writer’s work… that’s why the specific arrangement of words is protected by copyright and why there is no copyright on ideas.
1 comment:
I keep a lot of stuff others would bin. Below is part of a very old e-mail from this accusatory woman. She had sent me the idea of a character, a piano tuner in South America... she sent me lots of prompts at the time and I thought this was another such prompt and so wrote a story from the prompt. I did it to please her and, as a mark of how much I thought this was ok to have done, I offered to send my story to her (for her approval). She declined at the time saying she was going to write a piano tuner story of her own and did not want the ideas in my story to influence hers. She said nothing against my having written mine... why would she? What's to say? But below is what she much later wrote, after my story had had some success:
"...this was a character I was going to use myself... Normal courtesy would have you check to see if I still intended to use my idea, prior to thinking of sending yours out anywhere.
Using my character idea is not plagiarism, I have not said it is. It is simply indefensible plundering of the unpublished ideas of a colleague.
We ALL take seeds from everywhere, Douglas. But in a close working relationship, you do not use, without seeking permission first, (and being prepared for a 'no') the unpublished work or ideas of a colleague."
There's some nitty gritty there to unpick, but some obvious things which she has recently contradicted include that she says this is NOT plagiarism and that it is a simply a lack of curtesy. I would go further and say that there was no discurtesy intended and she earlier gave no indication that there was anything amiss in my having written the story I wrote.
I am genuinely trying to make sense of what this woman says against me and I find her contradictory and confusing.
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